Author: Salvador Puente

Domains, URLs, and websites

There is no point in having ten different domains pointing to your website. That’s too much and you are just wasting your money. That says a lot about what people know about the internet and how it works.

One domain is more than enough. What you want to do is to position that domain, so everybody knows where to find you when looking for your company. Having a separate website with its domain for every marketing campaign you perform makes no sense.

But first things first. Let’s clarify some concepts so you know what I’m talking about. Many people use domain, URL, website, and other terms interchangeably, which leads to confusion and misunderstanding.

A website is like a house. It’s your home on the internet. It can be as big or as small as you want, it can also be any color you want, you can put whatever you want on it as long as it is legal, or it could even have a store on the first floor, and a secret room for members only.

Your website can be as simple or as complicated as you want, but you have to remember that not everybody has the same internet speed and not everybody has the same computer or cellphone. So keep it simple, because you want to be accessible for most people.

What you want is to have your website appear on the first page of results when someone searches for something on the Internet related to what you do. Photo by Sarah Blocksidge on Pexels.com

Your house needs an address, a special kind of address for the internet called an IP address. This kind of address is numerical and is hard to remember, like 192.168.277.68, or something like that.

To make it easier for everybody, domain names were created. Domains are associated with a specific IP address, so instead of remembering a long set of numbers, you just need to remember something like yourcompany.com.

It doesn’t have to be a .com, it can be a .net, or a .org, or any of the many options available. It really doesn’t matter as long as it reflects the name of your company and what kind of product or service you offer.

Some companies won’t let you advertise on their platforms if your domain and the name of your company don’t match, so don’t buy thebestsiteontheplanet.com if that is not your company name. Keep it simple and easy to remember.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which is nothing but a string of characters containing a protocol, a domain, and a file name. This tells the web browser where to find a file and how to access it. They look like this: htttp://myothercompany.com/index.html.

You don’t need to worry about URLs, you can leave that to the computer people, but you need to understand how domains and websites work. So, let’s go back to what we were saying at the beginning of this post: you want your domain to appear on the first page of a Google Search.

People are more likely to visit the website of the first three to five companies they find. So you want to be one of them, right? You can achieve this by posting a lot of content related to a certain subject AND by advertising your website.

So don’t waste your money trying to position ten domain names at the same time. Focus on your content and a good digital marketing strategy. You just need one very well-positioned domain name to get great results.

25 de June de 2023
One exclamation mark is enough!

Grammar and proper punctuation are extremely important not only because they will make any text in your ads readable and thus understandable to your audience. They are also very important because your ad could get banned by whichever platform you are using for poor grammar.

No, I’m not kidding. Any ad can be banned due to poor spelling, a syntax error, or excessive use of punctuation signs. Most people think they are excellent at grammar, but they’re not. There are a lot of “rules” spreading around that are incorrect.

Remember, simple is beautiful. There is no need to use complicated wording when you can say the same thing more simply. At least not when writing ads. A simple text will convey a message more effectively than a complex one. So no fancy wording, please.

The dictionary is your friend. Use it. We have many tools on the internet that can help us do this. Most of them are free. If you’re not sure what a word means, look it up. Better make sure that you’re saying what you think you’re saying.

Also, learn how to use punctuation marks. Everybody thinks they are an expert and they are not. A lot of people repeat “rules” they heard somewhere for the use of commas and semi-colons, but most of them are wrong. Don’t do that. Look it up. It just takes a few seconds.

The most common mistakes people make while writing an ad are using too many exclamation marks and over-capitalizing words. There is no need to use three exclamation marks on one sentence, in the same way not every word needs to start with a capital letter.

The dictionary is your friend. If you’re not sure about something, look it up.
Photo by Nothing Ahead on Pexels.com

Think about how people will look on Google for your products or services. What words would they use? That’s how you should write your ad. Simple natural language is way more effective than over-complicated text.

You’re not writing a novel or a technical essay, you are writing a piece of advertisement and it should be simple because you want it to be read and understood by the most people possible. Keep your messages simple and effective. Don’t try to say everything in one little sentence.

If you want people to visit your website, talk about that. If you need people to take a look at your new products, say so. Whatever your objective is, keep it simple. Don’t try to do everything all at once. Clear objectives make better ads and better ads give better results.

That’s it! Use simple wording for your ads, check your grammar, and don’t over-use punctuation signs and capital letters. Google and Facebook will ban your ad if you do that. If you want to find out more about this, read their policies.

29 de May de 2023
How much does it cost?

When a client starts talking to me or any member of my team about advertising on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or any other social media, the first question they ask is how much does it cost? That question has a very simple answer and a very complex one. So, I always give both.

The simple answer is that advertising on any social media costs just a few cents a dollar per view. That means that every time your ad is displayed on anybody’s screen, that platform charges you just a few cents of a dollar, around 30 cents on average.

You want your ad to be displayed as many times as possible so many people can see it. The more the better, right? So, if you want your ad to be seen by at least 1,000 people, you should invest around 300 dollars, right? Wrong!

What happens is that, when you are setting up an ad campaign on any social media platform, you start bidding for your ads to be displayed. Just like an auction. So the price is never the same. On average it is 30 cents, but it can be as low as 3 cents or as high as 5o cents, depending on the day of the week, the hour, as well as other factors.

You don’t have to invest a lot of money to start advertising your company on social media. You can start small and see what happens from there. Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

You can invest 50 dollars in one week and display your ad on over one thousand screens. It all depends on how you configure your campaign as we discussed before when we were talking about your campaign objectives.

Advertising on social media is a lot cheaper than advertising on traditional media, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap. If you want to get great results, you have to invest as much as you can. The more the better.

You can choose if you want to be charged for every thousand views or by every single time your ad gets displayed. You have a couple more options to choose but remember that before you decide you have to know what your goal is because that changes everything.

But let’s say that this time you want to do this the easiest way possible and get the best out of a few dollars. In that case, you should set a start date and an end date for your campaign. Then you should set a budget for the whole campaign instead of a daily budget, so you have more control over how your money is spent.

Another thing you should do in a case like this is to choose the cost-per-click scheme, so you will only be charged when somebody clicks on your ad. That doesn’t mean that person will buy something from you, but it means you will pay only for those who interact with your ad.

This way you can get better results for just a few dollars. Remember, if your budget is bigger, then you should do things differently, but if you are just experimenting with 50-100 dollars a week, try this and use it as a reference for later more expensive campaigns.

It should be great to see what happens and you can learn a lot without spending too much money in one experiment. Doing this will give you a better idea of how much it cost to advertise on social media platforms and what kind of results you can get.

14 de May de 2023
Not as easy as it looks!

A few months ago, a friend of mine was telling me he wanted to start posting content on his social media profiles for his business. He didn’t ask for my help and he didn’t ask for any advice, he just said he was doing it and that it was an easy thing to do.

Last week, I had dinner with this same friend. He was complaining about how hard it is to come up with something interesting enough to post. He told two other friends that posting on social media was very difficult and that it wasn’t as easy as he thought.

He was saying he was out of ideas and that he needed help. One of the other friends looked at me and said something like “That is what you do, right?”. This guy looks at me and says “I thought you were in Marketing”. You can imagine what my answer was.

So, yes, you can do it yourself, but you need to have a plan. You need to have a strategy. If you don’t you will run out of ideas very soon. Like my friend did. This is a very time-consuming activity. The best thing you can do is to have somebody exclusively dedicated to this.

I know there are a lot of companies that hire a graphic designer and let them take care of their website, their e-mail campaigns, their newsletter, their logo design, their photos and videos, AND their social media content. That is the worst thing you can do, as we have discussed in previous posts.

There is a reason why Community Managers and Social Media Managers were created. If you can’t hire a Digital Marketing team, at least have someone that will handle exclusively your social media content.

Always have a plan, be ready to answer a lot of questions, and be prepared for all kinds of situations. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Many think that it is “only posting on Facebook”, and “how hard can it be?”. Well, it is a lot harder than you think and no, it is not only posting on Facebook. People don’t like to hear this, but that’s the truth. You need at least one professional Community Manager.

In previous posts, we have already talked about the importance of a content plan. You need a tone, a style, topics for your posts, a graphic concept, and a few other things. But the most important thing is that you need someone with the necessary criteria about what to post and how to post it.

This person needs to have some experience and some knowledge about what they are doing because they will be making a lot of fast decisions and calls about your published content and about how to respond to the interactions they will be having with the people that follow your company on social media.

Taking some online courses is ok, but that’s not everything. Those courses will teach you the technical aspects of being a Community Manager, but they will not give you the creativity or the experience needed to perform this job, as my friend has found out.

There is only one thing that can give you all the skills that you need to become great at this job, and that is doing it. Make a plan, stick to it, and in a few months, you will be looking at the results of your hard work. Be ready, so that when mistakes happen, you know what to do.

23 de April de 2023
It’s all about the numbers

Every decision we make about our digital marketing campaign has to be based on numbers. What to post, when to post, on what platform, should it be boosted, or should it be a paid ad; all these questions have to be answered based on statistics.

Where do we get these numbers? That is also a very important aspect that we have to resolve before anything else. We need to pick a tool that helps us gather these numbers and help us make all those other important decisions.

There are free tools and there are paid tools. Every platform has its own set of free tools that give you basic information about your content, interactions, followers, and every other relevant aspect of your social media.

If you want to stay on budget and don’t mind having to do a lot of things manually, like generating a report, then the free analytics tools should be enough for you. There is no need to pay that extra money, especially if you know your way around Excel or any other similar tool.

But if you feel that you need extra information or that you don’t have the time to create manual reports, then you can choose from a wide set of tools that a lot of companies are offering. It depends on your budget and what kind of information you need to get.

Photo by Lukas on Pexels.com

One tool may work wonders for one brand and not work at all for another. That’s why I’m not recommending any tool to anybody. For that, you will have to make your own research. Don’t pick the first one that shows up on the results page of a Google search. Compare tools and prices. Really, do it.

Of course, I have my favorite, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to impose that tool on all my clients. Depending on the information needed, that’s the tool I’m going to use with that account. The larger the account, the more expensive tool we are going to need.

But let’s say that is not the case. A small business doesn’t need a lot of accounts for a whole team of data analysts. A basic report should be more than enough to support our decisions. So any of the paid tools should be more than enough.

It’s a matter of personal taste, to be honest. Because all of them are very similar. They have very similar interfaces and they give you basically the same information. The difference is the way they look and the templates they use for the reports. And that’s pretty much it.

So, do your research, pick a tool, make sure you configure it to get the information you want and start using it. You will have to learn how to interpret those numbers, but once you have enough data, things will get easier. It will be worth it.

26 de March de 2023
Take the ladder!

If you are constantly promoting your products on Instagram and/or Facebook, people might get tired of watching your ads all the time and they might lose their effectiveness. That’s why it is important to have some periods without paid ads and let some organic growth happen.

Paid ads should be used when you have important information to share with your followers, like the launch of a new product or relevant news of any kind, but you have to be careful not abusing them because people might get used to seeing your ads and start ignoring them.

If you are beginning and want to let people know that there’s a new face in your business sector, that’s a different story. Awareness is one of the most important steps of every strategy and you should invest as much as possible in this, but just for a few months.

Once people know who you are and what you do, you can move on to the following stages of your campaign. You can boost some posts if you consider that the information they contain is relevant to your customers; but if you saturate people’s newsfeeds with your ads, they will unfollow you.

Alternating periods of paid activity with periods of organic activity looks like a ladder on a graph, hence the name of this pattern of growth. Photo by Burak The Weekender on Pexels.com

One thing that works very well for most brands is to alternate periods of paid reach with periods of organic reach – that means periods with paid ads and periods with no paid ads. That way people don’t get tired of you, and your business keeps growing.

As long as you have fresh content every week, everything is ok. Because if your only activity on social media is having paid ads campaigns and promoting your products, that means you are having long periods of inactivity and that is not good at all. It’s boring.

Remember, your content has to be of value to the people that follow you. Not every post should be about you selling your products like we have been discussing in previous posts. Your content should keep going independently of your ads, though they should be coherent.

That way people will be interested in seeing what’s going on on your social media profiles all the time, and not only when there’s a campaign running. This alternation of paid reach and organic reach is known as a ladder pattern of growth, because of the way it looks on a graph, and this is one of the best ways to grow on social media.

Even if you had the money to keep your ads running all year, you shouldn’t. That will get old fast. Try intercalating paid and organic reach and wait to see the results. In case you have something really important to share, you can always boost that post to help it get to where it needs to go.

12 de March de 2023
Don’t be afraid to ask

The other day, a friend of mine was telling me about the kind of conversations he had with his social media person, and he was saying something about not understanding half of what this person said to him. He thought he knew all the terminology, but now he wasn’t so sure.

He said something about needing more “conversions”, but I realised that what he meant was that he needed more engagement when he explained to me that he would like to have more likes and comments on his content. He was confusing these two frequently used terms.

Engagement is the amount of time people spend interacting with your content. That includes likes, comments, shares, and all the other possible interactions anyone can have with any kind of content on the internet.

A conversion is when people perform a predetermined action that we asked them to do, like when somebody clicks on the subscribe button of our YouTube channel, adds an article to their shopping cart, or hits the download button to get our app.

It’s easy to be confused about these two concepts, but it’s very important to know the difference, especially when establishing the objectives of a digital marketing campaign. Do we want to get more likes on our Instagram account or do we want more subscriptions for our newsletter?

If you don’t know what something means or you’re not sure how something works, ask your team. They are there to answer every question you mught have. Photo by Katerina Holmes on Pexels.com

Many times people pretend to understand what you’re telling them because they don’t want to be seen as someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but this is the wrong thing to do because it will only lead to many misunderstandings down the road.

If you’re not sure about what something means, don’t be afraid to ask. There’s nothing wrong with asking. It’s better to make sure that everybody is on the same page than to later find out that everybody on the team had a different idea of what was the goal.

Even when everybody knows all the concepts and terminology, sometimes things get lost along the way like we said on a previous post, and people end up understanding something completely different than what was said. Mistakes happen all the time, and you need to be ready to make corrections.

Is like going to the market in a foreign country, trying to buy some apples and getting oranges in return because you didn’t know the right word for them. You can imagine the frustration anyone would feel in such a situation.

That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t know something or don’t understand enough about how something works, ask your digital marketing team. They should be there for you, not only to do their jobs but to also answer all of your questions and clarify every little detail.

26 de February de 2023
What do you mean?

Sometimes we take a lot of things for granted, like the meaning of words. We think that everybody knows what one word means, but to our surprise, it is not always like that. Each of us could have a different meaning for the same word, which could lead to misunderstandings.

Think of the word “house”. What’s the picture in your head? Do you imagine a one-floor or a two-floor building? Does it have a garden and a fence? What’s the color on the outside? Each one of us creates a very different image inside our heads. Each one of us gives a different meaning to it.

Another thing that happens is that we all think we know the meaning of a word. We believe we do, but when we look for it in the dictionary we find discrepancies; most of the time it’s about slight variations, but sometimes we find that words mean something completely different from what we thought.

This phenomenon becomes very relevant when you’re writing a book, an article for a newspaper, or an ad. Are you sure that everybody will understand whatever it is that you are trying to say? Will the picture inside their heads be the one that you want it to be?

That’s why you have to do your research. Make sure that you know what you’re saying and that everybody will understand the same thing. Some companies do this for big corporations, but since we don’t have that kind of budget, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

Words mean different things to each one of us and that can lead to many misunderstandings or even cause conflicts. Make sure you know what words mean. Photo by Craig Adderley on Pexels.com

Ask your friends, your neighbors, or anybody around you that you can get to read your ad and that might help you make sure that your message is very clear and understandable to anybody who reads it. Of course, you will make some interesting findings if you do this.

What do we do then? You can’t get inside people’s heads and change the way they think or what they understand, but you can change other things. Choose another wording, use a synonym, or add another word that makes it even more clear. Control what you can control.

I know about a campaign that fell apart after the agency discovered that they were using a word that people didn’t understand. And it wasn’t the case of a little-known word with a strange meaning, it was just that people understood different things. The word was “tolerance”.

Words are concepts, and each one of us has a unique concept for them. That’s why dictionaries were invented, so we could all agree on the meaning of words. Sometimes we need to use images, font faces, colors, sizes, and layouts to make our message clear. But we will talk about this some other time.

12 de February de 2023
Google Ads or AdSense
What should you use to promote your brand on the internet, Google Ads, or Google AdSense? I know this is confusing for many people, especially those who are just starting with digital marketing, but these two are very different tools. Let’s clear this out.

Google AdSense is an ads network service designed for publishers. For example, if you own a website, blog, or forum and want to monetize them, this program can help you do exactly that. You have to agree to a lot of policies to use this service.

What AdSense does is it makes ads appear on your website, and you earn money based on the number of people who see or interact with those ads. The more people that visit your webpage, the more that will see the ads, and the more that you will get paid.

Have you noticed the group of ads that appear usually on the right column or the bottom of your favorite forum, whichever it may be? That is Google Ad Sense at work, and that means that website is getting paid every time you see or interact with an ad.

AdSense displays ads on your website and you get paid when people see or interact with those ads. Google Ads charges you for displaying your ad to a predetermined audience defined by you.

However, Google Ads is a program designed for advertisers. That means that this is the service you should use if you want to promote your products or services. You pay Google to show your ads to people that are searching for something on their platform.

Google Ads displays your ads on the search results page and their network of publisher websites. This option gives you a lot more freedom regarding the text, the format, and the design of your ad, unlike AdSense. You still have to agree to some policies though.

You don’t need a lot of money to do this. Opposite to what most people think. anyone can invest a small amount of money and still get results. Of course, the more you invest, the better the results that you will get, but there is no minimum and you have many options depending on what your business goal is.

Google Ads is a great tool when trying to drive more traffic to your website and/or increase your sales. They can also be great for generating leads, increasing app downloads, getting more people to subscribe to your newsletter, and many more things.

If you want to learn more about these tools, and a few similar others that Google has, you should visit their website.
- Google AdSense: https://www.google.com/adsense/start
- Google Ads: https://ads.google.com/home
29 de January de 2023
Say anything you want, but you have to listen also…

Communication is a hard thing to do, communication on the internet is even harder, and it becomes even more difficult to do it as a brand and not as an individual. If you have a message and want it to be heard by most people, you have to follow certain rules.

If you are too aggressive, too loud, or too soft and not clear enough, you won’t get the kind of attention you’re looking for. You have to be careful with the kind of tone and language that you’re using because you don’t want to offend anyone and lose potential customers.

In these times of internet scams, fake news, and disinformation, it’s not a smart business decision to get involved in political debate, or any illegal activities, so be careful to whom you give your support.

I mean, as an individual you can do whatever you want, but just don’t drag your brand into it, unless you don’t mind losing half of your customers. Very big names in various industries have lost everything because of one wrong post on Facebook or one wrong image on Instagram.

But not only that, if you earn a reputation for bad customer service or as a brand that doesn’t care about its customers, you’re doomed. If you have too many bad reviews on Google or any other place, people will notice and they won’t do any business with you anymore.

In any human interaction, like any conversation, when one of the parts stops listening to the other, the exchange of information stops happening. Photo by Vera Arsic on Pexels.com

The most important rule is that, if you want to send a message effectively, you have to go through the whole cycle of communication. First, you send a message, then you listen for a response (repeat as many times as needed). It sounds simple and silly, but I assure you it is not.

You can say anything you want or almost anything, and repeat it as many times as you want to get your message through, but you also have to listen. Any effective conversation works this way, or else it becomes a monologue.

An exchange of information can only occur if you follow these simple steps, and as a brand, we must do so. Everybody is already doing the first part, that’s easy, but the tricky part is to actually listen to what people are telling you like we have said so many times.

Most of the time people just want to be heard, they don’t want to take advantage of you, they just want to get the kind of service they deserve. I agree that some people make the most ridiculous requests just to see if they can get away with it, but most are not like that.

Basic stuff like this is frequently taken for granted, and that’s when the problems start. It may sound funny, but it is true. Keep in mind this is not a monologue and it is not a discussion, it’s a dialog, and dialogs have two parts. So, if you want your message to be heard and you want to be able to say anything you want, you also have to listen.

15 de January de 2023