October 10, 2010

Flavio: Yes. If you're listening for the first time let me give you a little bit of an idea of what "The New Reality" really is all about. This is a radio show that talks about one of the fastest growing areas on the whole planet, which is online marketing, and the world of online business.

Patrick: Yeah. It's definitely huge, and it's growing every single day. If you're not online already, and there are a few people out there who might not be online yet, you need to get online. There is so much opportunity for growing your business, for increasing your sales, and expanding your visibility online. There is so much opportunity not just from having a website but also from ways that you can build on that website. Last week we talked about mobile media and how that is rapidly becoming a huge dominating force in marketing. There are going to be more people using their mobile phones, smart phones or SMS or text than there will be for the combined PC and laptop population. That is just in a couple of years.

Flavio: We've actually had some feedback from some of our listeners that they've actually told us that it's almost a little too much. We've been providing such a wealth of information that most people are starting to get a little bit confused saying, "Okay, what do I do? How do I go from here? Yeah, I have a website but now what? What do I do next?"

Patrick: Exactly. Yeah. It can be overwhelming. The biggest thing to keep in mind is you shouldn't get bowled over by how much possibility there is for where you can take your website. You can just learn a little bit at a time. That's the purpose of the show today that Flavio and me are going to be talking about. Ways that you can build upon your website but that won't confuse you and won't overwhelm you. We have a list of suggestions and you can listen to them. The ones that you feel resonate the most with you, look into it and see if you can pursue it. You can always pick up the other things later on. It doesn't have to be all at once. A small, slow build is the way you win the race for this, just like with any other business.

Flavio: Now, one of the things to keep in mind is that online media has changed dramatically over the last 10 or 12 years. I remember that, 10 to 12 years ago, the whole idea of the Internet was really for everybody to have a website. It was actually quite simple for businesses to market online ten years ago. As long as you had a website and you put a couple of keywords within your website, you know, the search engines, back then called directories, they would find you, or you would submit your site, and then basically you were promoting your business to the entire planet. It was very affordable. It was very simple. As like I said, anybody could do it.

Now, just like traditional advertising, things have changed dramatically over the last ten years. Now, unfortunately, it's at the point that if you want to do any online and Internet marketing, you can still do the basics, which are some of the things that we're going to discuss today. But keep in mind that if you want to explore other opportunities, we urge you to contact companies like Snaptech or other media companies that can actually help you put some strategic marketing ideas together.

Patrick: Yes. That's right. Maybe this is a good point to talk a little bit about Snaptech, give you an idea about what we do if you're just listening for the first time. Snaptech is a company that builds websites and also creates online media for companies. We've been in business for eight years, and we've worked with hundreds of companies across BC, through Canada and the United States, helping them get online with the right website that will attract visitors who will be engaged and also contact them so that they can increase their online sales. We also do online advertising. That can range from writing content, which is my primary role at Snaptech, to coming up with an online advertising campaign where they can advertise on Google, Facebook, or Bing. Search engine optimization is also a big part of what we do, which is making your site more attractive, more easily picked up by the search engines, and gets you better placement on them and a whole other bunch of features.

Flavio: You can also follow us on Facebook and on Twitter by going to our website, to Snaptech.com, and at the bottom of the website, you will find the links to our Facebook page, our Twitter page, as well as our LinkedIn page.

Patrick: Yeah, that's right. Okay. We're coming up to our first break. So, right after we get back, we're going to be talking about ways you can build upon your website. You've got a website. Now what? What do you do to increase your opportunities? Stay tuned. We'll be right back.

Announcer: You're listening to "The New Reality" with Flavio Marquez.

Patrick: Hi, there, and welcome back to "The New Reality." I'm Patrick Sauriol, the Senior Copywriter for Snaptech. If you're just joining us, we're going to be talking today about a subject that is going to hopefully clear up the air about what you can do with your website once you have it. The topic of the show is "So I Have a Website, Now What?" That might be a question that you're asking yourself. Suppose you're in business and you have a website for whatever it is you make, the product or service. Now that it's online, you've had it built and it's probably professionally done. It looks great. You showed it to your family and friends to get feedback. You're doors are open online, but you're waiting to get business. What do you do? That's going to be the topic of our show today.

Flavio: Thank you, Patrick. I'm Flavio Marquez, the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Snaptech. Before we get into the subject for this week's show, there's actually one thing I want to talk about. In previous shows, as I mentioned, we have had a number of guests who have actually talked about a lot of different online promtion ideas and initiatives from mobile marketing from short message or SMS text messaging marketing ideas. We've talked about location based services and so on and on and on. One of the things that we've talked about is that we don't want to confuse you with all this information. What we actually want to do is to empower you by giving you the knowledge of what is out there, so that as you are planning your media campaigns for the upcoming year, you can actually be aware of everything that is out there so that you can start to consider how you can incorporate some of these ideas into your marketing campaigns.

I am actually going to talk about one thing right now that has, it's related to the show obviously, but it's very important that I bring it up because it is actually somewhat of breaking news, which is news from Google. Google actually, just a few days ago, announced that they're going to be launching their Google TV. Now Google TV, it's something that, it's kind of gone through a little bit of transformation over the last few years. Google TV has been around for a number of years. When they actually came up with Google TV, it was actually a way for advertisers to be able to create TV campaigns that you could actually put on a selective number of TV sets in the US so that you could actually advertise your company, your products, and so on. Now, that is still the case. That is still available only in the US, so I am not going to talk about that.

I am going to talk about the new Google TV. Basically, Google TV, what it's going to be doing is that they're actually going to be combining the world of television with Internet. Now, this is something that's been coming for the last few years. We've been talking about it. This is just a natural evolution of the Internet. But with this, it is going to be the first time that we actually see a major player like Google actually making such a big movement in this. In a nutshell, Google TV, you are going to be able to buy a Google TV ready TV. Sony is actually in the process of making a television that is going to be Google TV ready. If you already have an existing entertainment center, television, or so on, then you're going to be able to buy a set-top box that is going to hook up to the Internet and is going to bring your Internet and everything into your television set.

Now, you're probably wondering right now why I am talking about this, you know, if we're talking about marketing. The reason I mention this is because, again, this has been breaking news. It is something that we're going to be hearing a lot more over the coming months on how this is going to affect the way that we watch television and the way that we advertise on the Internet. In the past, if you wanted to advertise on television, well, really there was only one way. Spend a whack of money and then put your ad on television. Now, the way that Google is doing this new Google TV and the way that you can actually create TV ads on their system, this is going to be transforming and changing the way that we advertise on television.

b So what, like for instance, if Google has analytics already and they're able to tell so much information from the websites that we visit, with a Google TV, would they be able to find out what shows we're watching, how long we're watching them for, and then be able to offer that type of targeted advertising for television?

Flavio: Well, although there is nothing that confirms that that is the case, I would be surprised if they are not planning on doing that. Everything will be in digital now, and they'll have all these streaming capabilities for advertising and television and everything else. I can almost guarantee you that they're going to know exactly what you're watching through their system so they can actually potentially have targeted TV campaigns. Now, if I was to make an educated guess, let's say that I'm watching the Super Bowl through Google TV. When there's a commercial break, there's a very good chance that through Google TV I probably am going to be looking at different commercials than you, Patrick, will be looking at because we are in a different segment. We have different interests, different likes.

b Right.

Flavio: So, more than likely, Google is going to be targeting advertising to different segments of the population. I mean, now that's one example that I can think of.

Patrick: Well, I mean, here's the other thing, too. If they tie together the Internet data that they have about what sites are being visited and they put that towards your television interests, they can show you commercials that are targeted for the websites that you're interested in. So if you're watching the Super Bowl and you're really interested in, I don't know, say a certain type of vehicle because you've visited that type of website or that type of message forum, they can then offer that type of targeted marketing to a customer who has that website. So, you can watch that during your Super Bowl. That's incredible because that beats out the network TV by miles.

Flavio: It is. And really, that's the whole objective of Google TV, which is to actually bring more relevant content and information now to your living room. Before it was to your PC, now it is to your living room.

Patrick: So, let me ask you, I mean, what type of time frame do you think we're going to start seeing this happen with Google TV?

Flavio: Well, you know, the way that these things are evolving, it's happening so fast that even something that ten years ago was announced, it would probably take five, six, seven years to come up. Now, things that are being announced, they're rolling out within one or two years. So, I would not be surprised if by this time next year we're already seeing a lot more of this, because people want this stuff. They're asking for this stuff. I mean, right now with Sony already launching their new Google TV television set, they're going to be the first one. I'm sure that all the manufacturers are going to be following pretty soon.

Patrick: Wow. Wow. Just another thing we have to keep in mind as we roll forward. Wow.

Flavio: Exactly. But again, we mention these things because we want to empower you and get you to know these things so that, again, as you are planning media campaigns you are always thinking, "What else can I do over my competition?" You have to be aware that there is so much more out there than your basic search engine optimization that everybody talks about. There is so much more. I mean, it's a world of information out there.

Patrick: You're listening to "The New Reality" brought to you by Snaptech. You can learn more about "The New Reality" or Snaptech by visiting us online at Snaptech.com. You can send an email to us at ideas@Snaptech.com as well.

On today's show our topic is going to be "So I have a Website, Now What?" The whole idea is if you are already online and according to one statistic that I've got here 44% of small businesses right now in Canada do have a website, so that's still under 50% but it's still a good chunk of the population. You might have website but you're not sure if it is being used right. You're not sure if your customers out there are seeing it. You're not sure if you're getting the value from it that you want.

Flavio: Now, interestingly enough, the same survey found that 82% of consumers, and get this, the same owners of the small businesses, use a search engine when they need to find local businesses to help them or any other information.

Patrick: That's right. That's right. So, for instance, if I'm looking for, I don't know, fast food delivery, and I want to feed my family at 7 o'clock at night, I don't want to cook dinner, I'm going online now, even if I own a small business that is not online, to find a solution for my problem. That's the crazy number there.

Flavio: So, you have to think how ironic it is. I am a small business owner. I don't have a website. I haven't had time to build a website, yet I go online to look at competitor's websites or other companies' websites to get information.

Patrick: Right. Right. So, the bottom line here is look, if you don't have a website right now, listen to this program later on. Just get a website right now. It is vitally important. That is where your business is going, and there's only going to be more of it in the days to come.

Flavio:Exactly. And just a small commercial, you know, obviously, Snaptech, one of the things that we specialize in is we actually help businesses build strategic corporate websites. So, if you don't have a website and you actually need a hand, just give us a call and we'd love to talk to you and see if there's something we can do to help you.

bThat's right. That's right. I mean, we've worked with companies before that have come in that have no online presence whatsoever. They say, "Look, Flavio, I know it's kind of late. I don't have a website. What can I do to get on there and get me started?" And we'll work with them. We'll design a website that will help their business now and in the days to come. It will grow with them. You don't have to come in and you don't have to have all the bells and whistles. Just get a website right now and get the ball rolling and then you can build on it.

Flavio: Exactly. Now, let's assume that all of our listeners have a website.

Patrick: Right.

Flavio: We're actually here today to give you a list of eight things that you should consider doing now that you have your website. That's really what the show is all about today. Online media is now such a big field with so many different facets. It's easy to get confused. Hopefully, these eight ideas are going to allow you to have a more effective website. Don't worry if you don't have a pen and paper. We're actually going to be posting all of these eight ideas on our website. You can just go to Snaptech.com and go to the latest blog. We're going to be creating a blog specifically about the radio show, and we're going to be posting all of these ideas in our blog with a lot more detail.

Patrick: That's right. And you can also go online to our website Snaptech.com and listen to past shows of "The New Reality" where you can get lots of other ideas about how to grow your business. We have shows about mobile media, search engine optimization, how to blog, what things to say on your blog, and you can also read our own blog to get even more information about how to grow your business online.

Flavio: We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

Flavio: Hi, and welcome back to "The New Reality." I'm your host Flavio Marquez, Chief Strategy Officer and cofounder of Snaptech. In the studio, we also have our Senior Copywriter, Patrick Sauriol.

b Yup. I'm here today. We're going to be talking about a subject, if you have a website, what you do with it after it's online. That's the focus of today's show. The first topic we're going to get to today is . . . Flavio.

Flavio: Yes, we're going to be talking about making sure that your website is SEO friendly. Now, most of you are probably thinking right now, "What the heck does that mean?" In plain English, basically what this means is that the search engines, when they visit your website, they look at something completely different than what all of you or myself look at. When we look at a website on the screen, we're looking at the pictures, the pretty flashing things, and all that kind of stuff. The search engines don't really look at that. They look at the back stuff, what's called the HTML, which is the code that actually makes your website.

Patrick: So, wait. So, just wanted to make sure they understand it. SEO stands for search engine optimization.

b Correct. Yes.

Patrick: Okay. All right.

Flavio: And search engine optimization basically means that your website is optimized for the search engines. This is probably one of the key things that most companies don't really pay attention to. Again, when our web designer gives us a website, we see that it looks wonderful. It's got our colors. It's has our logo. It has our pictures, all that kind of stuff. And, yeah, it's got our content. But because you don't know what to look for, you're not sure if your website is search engine friendly. So you need to contact somebody that you may know, or us, or anybody that can actually give you a bit of an idea if your website is search engine friendly, meaning that the search engines when they visit your website if they're actually going to find information that they're looking for.

Patrick: So let me ask you a question here. Suppose my buddy has an auto body shop, okay, and there's a million auto body shops in Vancouver. He just gets this website and puts it online, Dave's Auto Body. Now that it's online, it looks attractive, you know, his phone number is on there, his hours of operation, you can contact him by email. How can he compete with the other auto body shops? You're telling me that search engine optimization is the way to go for that.

Flavio: It is. But before we get into search engine optimization, you have to make sure that the website is search engine friendly.

Patrick: Oh, okay.

Flavio: Meaning that you've got to make sure that you have all the basic information. Because again when the websites come, they have this thing called spiders, which is basically automated software that just crawls all over the Internet to look for web pages, downloads them to their database, they analyze all that information, and then they decide, based on what I see, where am I going to put you on the search engines. So, in your example that you gave me, for your friend that has the body shop, there are some basic things that you are going to need to do to make sure it's, again, SEO friendly, which is making sure that you have the correct layout of the HTML, meaning that things have to be done a certain way to make sure that the search engines find the most relevant information first. Make sure that you have, you know, the correct keywords meta tags. You may have heard this name, which is really the essence of the search engine. They need to have this meta information, which is the title, keyword, description, which is one of the most crucial things that they're going to look at when they're deciding where they're going to rank you.

Patrick: Well, okay. So, in the case of my friend, how can he tell, he's got his website online, but he's just looking at it and he is not aware of like what's going on underneath the hood, you know, to use a pun, right. But how can he know that he has, it's been optimized or is search engine friendly?

Flavio: Well, unfortunately that's a little bit tough because unless you're somewhat technical and you know how to view the source of the page and once you look at the source you have to know how to interpret what that source is. It's actually going to be a little bit tough.

bIs there one way that you could tell? Like, say you've been online for a few months though and you're not getting the leads or the emails that you're not, that you expect to be getting, or you don't see yourself turning up in the ranks when you type in "auto body Vancouver" in Google.

Flavio: Well, yeah, there are ways to just simply go to Google, Bing, or Yahoo, you know the bigger search engines, and look for your company. See if you come up. You can either look for your company by your company name, which you'd actually be surprised how many businesses don't even come up with their company name. If you're actually thinking I should be showing up for certain keywords, type in those keywords and see if you come up. Now, if you do not come up for any of the above, there's probably something very wrong with your website, because either Google has not been able to find it, or if they found it, they have not been able to get information correctly. So those are the things to keep in mind.

Patrick: Now, there is one thing there that Flavio said that's really important that I want to sort of tackle here as the copywriter. Is that he mentioned keywords. A keyword is a word, a phrase that is going to be getting people to take a look at your website. So, in the example of my friend, Dave's Auto Body, that's a name of him, that's a name of what he does for his business, but the problem is that he doesn't have Vancouver in the name of his website or the name of his business. So, if people type in "Vancouver auto body shop," he might not be showing up. Now, that doesn't mean you have to change the name of your company and, you know, refile all your business papers. What it means though is that your website needs to have in its title that you are a Vancouver auto body shop. So when somebody goes to Google and they're looking for you and they don't know that a guy named Dave does this type of service, you will still come up at the top of the ranks. That's what you need to worry about.

Flavio: Exactly. And this actually ties us into the next tip that we want to talk about. I am sorry again if we're flying through this a little fast. Again, don't worry about it. We're going to be posting all of this information on our blog on Monday morning. Just come to Snaptech.com and go to our blog and you'll be able to get this information.

This ties us into tip number two, your website content. Website content actually has two purposes. The first purpose that we're going to talk about for this example is to be what we call search engine friendly content as well. The search engines, yes, it's true they look at the HTML, they look at this, they look at that, but they're also going to look at all of the content that you have on your page. Believe it or not, Google having the billions and billions of dollars that they have, they've actually created these very sophisticated algorithms, which are basically mathematical functions I guess or formulas, to look at your content and analyze if this content reads properly and what it means. So, if you try to have, you know, content that actually talks about Vancouver this, Vancouver this, Vancouver this, and you repeat the same number of keywords a number of times, these algorithms are pretty smart and they're going to know that you're overusing those keywords to try to get better positions on the search engines. They will actually penalize you. Meaning that, instead of showing up in the first page, they're probably going to bump you to the 100th page.

Patrick: That's right. That's right. Now, there used to be companies before, ten years, way long time ago in Internet history, they would do this. It was called keyword stuffing. People would put phrases like Vancouver over and over again if you wanted to get targeted Vancouver searches. Google caught on to that pretty quickly. Like, Flavio said, they now will penalize sites and just remove them completely from search engines. And the thing is, if you're removed from the search engines, you're losing a huge source of traffic, especially if you are a business looking for getting other business from other companies, from other individuals, you want to be on the search engines.

Flavio: Absolutely. That's right. Now, we're going to talk actually about the second point, which is the content that people read, when visitors come to your website the information that they're actually going to see.

Patrick: That's right. Yeah. I know. This is my area as a copywriter. What you want to make sure is that, the number one thing is that the copy, which is the text on your website, it's got to read as clean as, as normal, as readable as possible. The people that come to your site want to have easy access. They want to be able to understand what it is you do. What type of service. What type of product you provide. The more that you sound like what a human being would say as natural as possible, the greater that connection is going to be with the reader. And Google, throughout its years of being on top of the game, has now put more weight on natural sounding content. That's why things like blogs are becoming more important. We'll talk about that later on in the show. But for now, the content on your page, which describes what you do, what your business does, that needs to sound as natural as possible.

Flavio: Now, think of it this way. Let's, we've all heard about the famous elevator pitch. What would you say if you happened to go into New York and you're stuck in the elevator with Donald Trump? You know you literally have 10 or 20 seconds to make a good first impression. You have to be on top of your game. Most people don't really know what they would do if that ever happened. Well, think of the website as the same exact situation. Right now, on the web, there are literally more web pages then there are humans on this planet. So, the competition is fierce out there. This also means that by the time that somebody takes the time to visit your website, either they've already been to a number of websites or they're planning to continue to a number of websites. So you only have a few seconds to catch their attention to make sure that they understand, number one, what it is that you do. Make sure that it is very, very clear, because if they don't get what you do in those first five to ten seconds, you're going to lose them. You're going to get X'd out, meaning they're going to close your browser and they're going to move on.

Patrick: Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is what I do, my specialty at Snaptech. As a copywriter, I want to make sure I can communicate that message in those first few seconds so those people are retained on your site so that eventually they convert, which means they contact you and you get new customers from that.

You're listening to "The New Reality" brought to you by Snaptech. We're talking about ways you can build on your website once it's online. You can learn more about Snaptech by visiting us online at Snaptech.com.

Flavio: We'll be right back.

Snaptech is a Canadian web design company offering a variety of professional website development, strategic marketing, analytics and usability services that include social media and mobile web design for b2b clients. Request a confidential quote by contacting our Vancouver web designers.

Announcer: You're listening to "The New Reality" with Flavio Marquez.

Patrick: Good morning, and welcome back. You are listening to "The New Reality" brought to you by Snaptech. This is a show all about online marketing, online business, how to grow your business, how to get more customers, and also about new forms of technology that you can use for your advertising. I am Patrick Sauriol. I am the Senior Copywriter of Snaptech.

Flavio: And I'm Flavio Marquez, Chief Strategy Officer and cofounder of Snaptech.

Patrick: So, we're here today to talk about what you do after you have a website. We're going to give you some tips about ways you can start building on it. You've got to think of your website as just like it's a new business. I mean, you already are in business and you might think of your website as a part of your business, but start thinking of it like this. As soon as you launch your website and it's open for people to come in and see what it is, you want to start building on it. You want to start giving it assets that will make it expand and grow and become better in those days ahead. That's what we do at Snaptech. We works with hundreds of companies throughout Canada to build their online marketing, to get them more traffic, and we have certain resources that we can use. We give them advice.

Flavio: One of the things that we focus on when we look at a website is how we can make it more effective. The third thing that we're going to be discussing this morning are actually called "call to actions." These are things that we're going to be hopefully getting your visitors to your website, getting them to do something on the site.

Patrick: Right. Right. So, let's define what the term is. A call to action is an event on your web page that you want people to do. Now, that could be as simple as having an attractive looking button on the side, maybe to the right-hand side or the left-hand side, top of the page, doesn't matter, that says, "Call Us Now" and gives a phone number. Or you could say, "Are you interested in this? Download some information about this product." Or it could be, "Do you want to learn more about this specific type of service? Click on here and we'll give you some more information." Those are call to actions. They are very powerful communicators to get people to remain on your website, to take interest, and to find out more information. The more you can do that, the greater the chance is to convert those people into customers.

Flavio: Now, with call to actions, it's very important that you don't just go ahead, put a button up, leave it, and then forget about it. Call to actions, because it's the single most important piece in your website that is going to hopefully convert and attract new business, new leads, contacts, purchases, to your website, you have to make sure that you constantly monitor the action, what is happening with those call to action buttons. It is something that you should be thinking of changing and testing different things. There's actually been a lot of studies out there that actually show an effective call to action versus a different call to action. And just by making a slight little change on maybe the word or adding an extra arrow or little tiny subtle things like this have made a dramatic difference where sometimes the conversion, which is how many people have clicked on those buttons, can actually increase by 200%, 300%, 400%.

Patrick: Right. Right. And that's hugely powerful. Now, I've been in meetings where we've had clients come into Snaptech and we've all sat around our table and the client says, "Look, I'm in business and I do this." And we explain to them what a call to action is. But then they look at us and go, "Well, how do I know what call to action I should have on my web page? How many should I have? Am I picking the right ones?" That's where we come in. As experts in online marketing, we're able to listen to what you do and get that information and then provide you with the advice to pick the right call to actions to have on your website. We're here to make sure that your business, your online business, keeps growing. We don't expect people to come to us and say, "Look, I've heard all this stuff. I know what call to action I have." It's our job to give you that information and to optimize your site to make it even more functional for you.

Flavio: To give you a quick example, we have a company that sells HR, human resource, software, and they also do quite a bit of consulting. This is a company out of Washington D.C. This client, we started doing a pay-per-click campaign for them. This is a Google campaign where he is paying for ads on Google. He was having pretty good results on his website. People were clicking on the ads. They were coming to the site. His call to action was a small form where he was asking for the first name, last name, email, I believe, and something else, I can't remember. He seemed to be happy with the conversions that he was getting, the number of leads that he was getting. We actually just relaunched the new pages for this website where we dramatically changed the entire page, all focused on the call to actions, which it was basically the same form, but strategically positioned in a better place on the page with better copy, better message, and his conversions have actually increased tremendously by doing these changes.

Yeah, we're going to move to the next tip that we have, which is social media promotion tools. Now, again in the past, we've actually had some guests discuss different aspects of social media and the things that you can do. We definitely invite you to go back to our website, Snaptech.com, and click on "The New Reality" radio link on the bottom of the site. Actually, you can go and listen to previous shows that have been archived and look for the ones that talk about social media. But right now, we're just going to talk about some basic things, which is some of the things that you can quickly do on your site for social media promotion tools.

Patrick: Right. Right. Right. I love social media. It's one of the most exciting areas. You probably have heard people talking about this, about Facebook, about Twitter, about LinkedIn. It does work. That's the thing. It is completely new, but the customers, the consumers, are working. There's a lot of talk about, you might have heard of business-to-business and business-to-consumer. There's actually a new term that social media advocates are using which is business-to-person, which is completely different, but it's a rethinking of how you approach selling your site or your customer or your product to that person.

Now, using social media is all about engaging people. There are tools out there that are very easy to incorporate into your site. I'm going to give you an example of a couple of them. Facebook and Twitter are the two biggest social media network platforms out there. By just including a button on your website which, where people can click on it and they can become a fan of your business or they can retweet something that you might be offering on your website, whether it's an anniversary sale, whether it is a seasonal product, if you just launched a new whatever it is a service or something like that, that information will go out into the larger Internet community. People will see it and people will act upon it. Now, you might think, "How can that be? Just by having some little 'like' button, is that really going to make a difference?"

Well, I'll give you an example of what I mean. One of our clients is Federico's Supper Club. I think it's okay to mention them on the air. They're a great little restaurant on Commercial Drive. They have a great website. It looks very, very polished. You can get all of the information you want about what type of food, what it is like, what type of dancing and singing events they have. They just recently came onto Facebook. We gave them consulting advice about how to do that. They just launched onto Facebook a week and a half, two weeks ago. By putting up information and telling people to come to it from just disseminating that with their small group of fans, they now have well over 130 people on there. I just checked a couple days ago. It's exploding. Those people are telling their friends and rebroadcasting that across their friends' streams. So, for example, if you "like" a group or if you "like" a service online and then you put something on there, like, say weekend sale, that information will come across the feed of all the people who are fans of your site on Facebook. Then those people can send it out to their friends and so on. So, you could have virally spread all this information, all this marketing, for nothing. Just the time it takes you to send it out there.

Flavio: Exactly. So, that's why it's key to make sure that you actually include some of these tools within your website to make sure that you don't forget about these basic things. Again, we're not talking about things that are going to break the bank, that are going to cost millions of dollars to do. These are really simple tools that you can implement on Monday.

Patrick: Exactly. And you can see a huge return from that. So, if you have, if you don't have these tools on your website right now, we'd be more than happy to give you some advice to help you out with that. Again, take a look at Snaptech.com. We have some information on there right now about social media. You can find it on the Internet services. You can read some information about how this can help your business.

Flavio: For the past hour, actually, we've been discussing about different ideas that you can do with your website. We have to assume that most of our listeners now have a website. We've already given you four quick tips on things that you can do with the website.

Patrick: Has it only been four?

Flavio: It's only been four. Time is just flying by very quickly.

Patrick: Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. Okay. Actually, you know what, maybe what would be a good idea, we can put this in a blog post and have the rest of the tips on there so people can read it at the leisure and they can take a look at it and refer to it any time. I think that's the best thing. I didn't even realize we were running out of time that quickly on this stuff.

Flavio: Well, unfortunately we are. There are some things that we still wanted to discuss like collecting email addresses for email campaigns, blogging, online advertising.

Patrick: Right.

Flavio: So, there's a few other things that we want to talk about. But definitely we're going to be putting this on our blog, so do come back to our website at Snaptech.com. Click on the blog. You're going to be reading the latest blog where you can find all this information and much more.

Patrick: Actually, you know, Flavio, maybe there's like one more thing we can talk about really quickly. I know we just have a couple minutes left, but lets' talk about Caller ID, because that's a really cool component of what we do at Snaptech. When we talk to the clients about that, I mean, their eyes just balloon up into saucers.

Flavio:Sure. Basically, what Patrick is talking about, this Caller ID, it's actually a software that we have developed at Snaptech. The reason that this software was developed was because as a marketing company one of the things that we tell all of our clients is that everything that you do online can be measured. You should always be thinking of what else can I do to stay ahead of the competition. There are lots of tools out there that you can use for managing your content of the website, for sending out emails, for analyzing stats. But this is usually information that is just all over the place. Right now, we actually developed this tool because it was kind of driving us crazy that these tools were not really talking and interacting to one another. We developed this tool so that we could have a lot more data and a lot more information on our websites. One of the features for this online marketing system that we have is basically called Caller ID for the website. Now, in essence what Caller ID for the website is, is that it actually translates what normally would be an anonymous visitor to the website into the name of a company of who is visiting your website.

Patrick: Right. Okay. So, like if somebody visits you through their Internet protocol address, you usually can't see that, but with the Caller ID component it now turns up and it shows you who they are or where they're coming from?

Flavio:Correct. One of the things that we've actually done is we've acquired a number of databases that we cross reference so that every time that you visit a website the server that is basically showing you the website is recording your IP address. Now, for those of you who don't know what an IP address is, think of that as your thumbprint on the Internet. This is what identifies you as a visitor to every single computer on the Internet.

Patrick: Yeah, and everybody has one of those. It doesn't matter where you're coming from.

Flavio: Everybody has one. There's nothing to be afraid of, like, "Oh my goodness, they're going to get all my information from this IP address." This is just basically as if you were driving down the street and you were broadcasting that you're driving a Ford or a GM, this is basically the same type of idea.

Patrick: Okay. All right. Okay. So, the person visits the website. What can we do with that information when they have this?

Flavio: Well, most businesses, we're talking about right now small, visiting the website from a house, but if you're actually a small business or a larger organization, your IP address will actually be attached to your company. So, through this database that we've collected, we can identify businesses based on their IP address. So that when you come in, instead of saying that IP address blah, blah, blah, came into the site, we can actually see the name of the business that came into the website and we can get more information as far as your address, your location, and so on, so that we actually know exactly who's come to the website and not just that, but what they're doing on an individual basis. So, for example, if you are a company XYZ, we can see that you went to Google, you typed in, for example, Vancouver web design, which are some of the keywords that we're looking for. And when they arrive at the website, we can see exactly what pages they've seen on our website so that way, when they contact us, we have all the data in our system. We know that they came from Google, the keywords they typed in, the sections and the pages they were on the website. When we engage our customers, we have a lot more information about them so that we can engage them a lot more efficiently.

Patrick: And any business can use it. It doesn't matter what sector, what industry, it doesn't matter.

Vancouver Web Design: Anybody can use this, absolutely.

Patrick: So, okay, so that's extremely powerful. You just created a proactive lead source then.

Vancouver Web Design: Correct. Yeah. We actually also have a radio show where we have a lot more information on our software. I think it was one of the earlier shows. I think it was the third or the fourth show . . .