We proudly stepped back from our plowed land to realize that we had not created a garden at all—it was more like a small farm. We probably should have had the sense to make a garden that was smaller and more manageable, but the excitement of growing our own food got the best of us and we are now taking care of a 15′ x 60′ garden. We’ll have a nice harvest at the end of the summer, and we’re looking forward to being self sufficient with our produce for a short while.

I imagine someday having a larger farm so we can be more self sufficient with our food. And then there are the dreams of having a real farm and not relying on other people at all for our food source. I would then know that the food sustaining me is organic, free range, hormone-free and pesticide-free. I would have total control of the results and know what I am putting on the plate in front of me.

I sometimes wonder if being self sufficient is a common dream. It seems to me like it’s an evolutionary trait inherent in our blood. You want to walk on your own as a baby. You want to drive to freedom in high school. You want a job after college and to cut the financial ties with your parents. You may want to work for yourself after school and start your own business. What happens after that? Your business grows and grows and your self sufficiency dwindles because it’s not easy to run a business.

There are so many parts and pieces to manage that you start to rely on other people with specific expertise that can do it better and faster than you. You probably have employees to do the daily work, an accountant, an attorney, a printing company, a PR firm and a marketing agency. You’ll probably never want to take on these jobs yourself, especially the attorney job. And you’re probably spending a large portion of your budget on marketing, and most likely, having other people market for you.

What if I told you that you could be self sufficient with part of your marketing efforts? More specifically, what if I told you that you could run and manage your own website? Here at Oneupweb, our web design service does more than create a pretty site for your consumers. By utilizing and customizing content management systems, we make it easy for you to update your business’s website, track your leads, manage your inventory and analyze your numbers. We make it intuitive and painless to run your own self sufficient online presence.

If you’re dreaming of breaking free from your marketing agency running your website, contact us and we’ll get you on your way.

I’m not really an impulse buyer—I usually go above and beyond researching products and options before I make a purchase.  Having my smartphone always with me has made the detailed process of product research to purchasing speed up.  I think that many new mobile consumers may also be experiencing this trend. I also believe many businesses are benefiting from their new on-the-go customer bases.

Consumers are ever evolving with their buying habits as they embrace new technologies, like smartphones. How have things changed? We can now scan bar codes and search for competitive prices for the same or similar products.  We can read reviews about businesses and their products and services. We can also post our own thoughts and share our experiences by writing reviews or publishing on blogs. And don’t forget our likes and dislikes are displayed throughout social networks.  For many businesses today, it is now their customer bases that drive sales or prevent them.  Ultimately consumers are now the sales people for companies.

How can businesses make mobile customers happy to ensure they communicate about products and services positively? A business needs to make sure their website is developed for a mobile screen, so that it is readable. The path to the conversion or sale also needs to look  good on a smaller screen. My HTC EVO does have a large mobile screen, so most sites read perfectly fine for me.

Here’s the latest example of how I (a consumer) have voiced my feelings about a product via a smartphone:

With the Amazon store app right on my home screen, I am now downloading songs left and right.  Disappointed with all of the negative reviews of Eminem’s new album, Recovery, I downloaded it so that I could form my own opinion… and so that I could have some slammin trax that I could listen to as I mowed the lawn.  I give Eminem a big thumbs up on this effort and I had to place an order for the double vinyl album.

Hey Eminem, next time you’re “up north” stop by and check out our studio here at Oneupweb in Traverse City.  I think you’d be a perfect candidate for our “Be Relentless” Podcast series. And, I’d love to hear what you have to say to your fans in the digital world.

I’m feeling like a brand new me as a mobile consumer, doing my research and making informed purchases.  Chances are that if I had a positive experience with purchasing on your website and noticed other great things you have for sale, I’ll be back.  I might not make the purchase the first time through, but if you have what I need, can get me the facts, have competitive prices and look legit…let’s do business!

If your business needs a hand with jumping into the mobile technologies, contact Oneupweb!

Oneupweb’s Mobile Marketing Services Include:

• Mobile website development
• Custom iPhone application development
• Custom solutions

As a nine year industry veteran, I was not overly surprised to hear any of these three conclusions. Online marketing continues to impress as it is the most trackable form of marketing available. At Oneupweb, we consistently hear from clients and prospects that their ratio of online marketing spend is growing year over year. This has been the case even when overall marketing dollars have been cut in these new economic times.

Search is still the king. While organic search optimization and paid search marketing continue to bring nuances in complexity and integration, the two channels continue to deliver value for marketers. Let’s face it, people still use search to discover more about everything in life. Even if purchasing takes place offline, in most cases search preceded the sale.

Social media is being leveraged by more marketers and the trend will continue. Savvy marketers will take advantage of social media’s more organic format of engaging an audience with the hopes that brand advocates will become a new sales force. Social media sites like Facebook are creating real opportunities to leverage paid advertising in areas like display advertising. Social media has the same one-two punch that search has offered for about a decade now.

The big question marketers face is, “How do you put together the right mix of online marketing and advertising?” There are many factors to be weighed in that decision making process. The realities of your marketing budget, your market share position, internal human bandwidth and appetite for risk/testing all come into play as you plan your approach. Some companies may crack the nut internally and others will seek outside council and partnerships. If you fall in the latter camp, we would love to give you a hand. Be sure to give us a holler.

So, Google Tags give you the opportunity to make your site stand out from your competitors. They also allow you to promote a marketing message that could help increase your click-through rate. This all gives you the opportunity to give customers a value add that could result in more business being generated through the online channel.

On the surface, Google Tags sound like a pretty great opportunity for a business to increase its online presence. And for any business that is currently running online campaigns, it also sounds pretty expensive.

However, the cost for this enhanced listing is only $25 a month. No CPC or CPM, just a flat rate of $25. Now, that probably peaked your interest. For only $25 you can differentiate your site from your competitors. That sounds great. Unfortunately, your competitors are thinking the exact same thing. So, when Google rolls out Tags to your area, don’t expect to be the only business that takes advantage of this opportunity.

What do you think of Google Tags? Are you currently using this feature? Are you planning on using it when it becomes available in your area?

Visit-to-Decision-Page Ratio
The decision page comes before your shopping cart. Here you present visitors with an offer for your product or service. Decision pages should include features, benefits, pricing, unique selling proposition and of course an ‘add to cart’ button.

Once you’ve identified your decision pages, you can work backwards and determine the percentage of visits that are actually being presented with an offer. If only 40% of your visitors make it to a decision page then you may have the following:

-Poorly targeted traffic

-Unnecessary intermediate pages

-Poor navigation structure

Focus on streamlining the visit-to-decision-page path. Are there ways to tighten the conversion funnel?  It may be as simple as making one page have a considerably higher bounce rate.

Decision-to-Cart Ratio
This ratio represents the transition from decision page to a product/service added to your shopping cart. Visitors who proceed to your shopping cart are demonstrating purchase intent. Potential reasons for low decision-to-cart ratios (15-25%) may be any of the following:

-Technical issues

-Uncompetitive pricing

-Lack of unique selling proposition

-Struggles with linking relative features/benefits to the consumer

Cart-to-Checkout Ratio
The cart-to-checkout ratio can be described as a visitor clicking checkout once they’ve added a product/service to the cart. Causes for a low cart-to-checkout ratio (below 70%) may include:

-High shipping costs compared to competition

-No opportunity to estimate shipping

-No inclusion of accepted payment types

-Unclear link to your privacy policy

Checkout-to-Order Ratio
The checkout-to-order ratio should serve as your starting point when it comes to improving e-commerce performance. There are a lot of simple improvements that can be made at this stage to avoid lost revenue. Be sure to only require what you need to process for an individual transaction; you haven’t earned the full trust of the consumer quite yet. With that said, offer an ‘express’ checkout for users who don’t want their information to be stored for future purchases. In other words, allow users to checkout as a guest or create a new account.

Other reasons for a low checkout-to-order ratio might be that you don’t allow users to calculate shipping until they’ve created an account. We’re seeing more savvy online shoppers who will open multiple carts from competitors and complete as much of the cart process as possible until they can obtain a final cost with shipping. With this behavior, it may simply come down to the lowest price and/or best shipping rates and options.

Depending on the product/service and amount of traffic your site generates, you could be missing out on a large chunk of revenue each month. Find a partner, analyst or e-commerce specialist who can help translate what a 10%, 20% or 30% improvement in checkouts to completed orders may mean to your bottom line.

No,no, please don’t have me committed. I’m not crazy! I’m actually just coming to grips with targeted online advertising. Recently, I’ve found myself actually paying a lot more attention to the ads being targeted and delivered to me on a daily basis. It seems that things have come a long way since the “Hit the Monkey to Win a Prize!” and dancing baby display ads of five years ago. Instead of trying to come up with a single advertising campaign that will have the broadest (and generally most generic) appeal, marketers are taking advantage of targeted advertising to deliver very specific advertisements. This advertising results in marketers reaching consumers on a more personal and individual level.

I spent a brief time looking up music festivals during lunch and I’m now getting ads for this summer’s Bonnaroo Music Festival on my favorite tech sites.

Advertisers are getting more bang for their buck, because they are able to deliver targeted advertisements based on consumer online profiles that consist of previous searches and pages viewed. After reading a few reviews of camping equipment online, I’m now finding myself targeted with advertisements for products I am actually interested in and have been shopping around for (see below).

I must admit, for years I avoided online display advertising like the plague. After years of generic, dull and aesthetically questionable ads, I’m finding myself taking a second look at today’s customized advertising. I do find it slightly eerie that there are databases out there compiling advertising profiles based on my internet usage and personal life…

… Nice try targeted ads, but I’m actually in a great relationship already. Or maybe it’s picked up on my recent searches on targeted advertising and is trying to throw me off its scent? *Folds up a tinfoil hat, just to be safe.*

Got questions about what targeted advertising can do for you? We’d love to hear from you and have you pick our brains. No computers, please.

If I go to a website to purchase hardware or software, and the site was designed by a friend of a friend who knows how to use Microsoft FrontPage, then I won’t be staying long. I don’t waste my time on amateur websites and neither should you.

A first impression of a site conveys a great deal of things to me. Within seconds of visiting a site, I can get a good idea of the company’s target audience and the type of customer service I should expect.

That first viewing is like a job interview. If something appears to be less than average, then I am going to assume the services or products will be of poor quality. A company needs to put their best foot forward when designing a website. It’s important that companies don’t cut corners when creating their image, because it’s easy for customers to turn to a different source.

If I don’t feel intrigued with a site, then I don’t need to waste my time or money with that particular company. In fact, this all holds true whether we are talking about a website, an individual or product packaging. When you take the time to do it right, people see that and they appreciate it.

You know what I’m talking about…think about all the times you have looked for a product online and you came across that one site that just made you laugh. There have been many times when I was looking to purchase something and found “That” site. The pathetic site may have had the product listed for ten dollars cheaper, but there was no way I would risk my credit card information with them.

I’m not saying that companies have to spend a bunch of money to do their websites right, but I do suggest they seek experts to create professional looking and functioning sites.

Does anyone have any sites they’d like to give a shout out to for having great design and function? Please do!

Printed typography is easy to read and rich in history, but the iPad is new and full of possibilities. Who knows where it will take us in the realm of interactive design. Will it replace print completely? I don’t think so.

I think instead of print shriveling up and dying, it will adjust and become refined. Print will remain, but the industry will shift and weed out the junk (tabloids and quick print materials). Printed collateral that is disposable—magazines, daily newspapers and some novels—will become digital.

Going digital will force designers to design books that will stand the test of time. These books will consist of interesting bindery, elaborate texture, amazing typography and dynamic printing techniques. I think instead of print dying, it will become comparable to art—collectible and appreciated. Ultimately, people will become intrigued with the detail and personality of actual books.

You can’t really read an iPad when you’re taking a sudsy bath. It’s uncomfortable knowing that you have nearly a grand hovering a couple inches above its watery grave. With print, you can take it anywhere without the fear of it drowning. I don’t know about you, but whenever I read material I don’t agree with, or I’m angered by a character in a novel, I tend to be somewhat physically abusive to the source I’m reading. I assume it’s not a good idea to slam an iPad against the headboard of a bed or across a tiled floor. I want something durable to read, not something I have to treat like a delicate laptop.

The iPad gives designers other mediums to work with…sound and video! As long as authors and designers can work together, big things can happen. Think of interactive novels with strategically placed movies, created by bits of sound and video. The iPad literally becomes a digital storyteller. It will be interesting to see how the iPad plays out and how designers will begin to design for “print” on screen. Novels containing mini-movies seem exciting and futuristic, but I don’t think consumers are ready to give up their own imaginations just yet.

Are you ready to let go of creating imagery for characters and settings?

Comparing these two Titans side by side, look at the traffic performance (thank you Compete.com):

Facebook shown in blue. Google shown in green.

Last month Facebook announced a whole new tagging system that will allow you to place Like Buttons, Comment Boxes, Recommendation Windows and Activity Updates more directly on your website. This is a sea change, a paradigm shift, a move to control the web as we know it.

The online marketing world was, of course, stunned and forced to scramble to figure out how to leverage this. Did this put marketers in a holding pattern to see what’s next? Not really. In barely a week since the changes were announced, Facebook released a story letting the world know that over 50,000 websites had already gotten on board. Check it out here: 50,000 Websites Quickly Follow Facebook Like Snakes Following St. Patrick

What amazing thing did Google do in response? They added brand names to some of their product search results. Take a look at the image below to see what I mean. Wow. Really Google? Are you finally just catering to big brands? I thought sites had to algorithmically prove themselves. The small guy could be the winner, right? I guess not anymore…

What does this all mean? Google is still, and will be for sometime, a hugely important part of your online marketing mix. This also means businesses need to get serious about how they are going to leverage all of the opportunities Facebook presents. It’s time to get integrated.

Oneupweb has definitley followed through with their mission of giving aid to Michigan businesses. The One for the Road: Operation Michigan tour is a perfect example of how Oneupweb has lended a helping hand to business owners, executives and entrepreneurs. Piling into a 1970’s RV for a  humanitarian road trip was certainly an adventure. Oneupweb Founder and CEO, Lisa Wehr, and staff traveled to numerous Michigan cities and provided free digital marketing consulting services to individuals across the state. This thoughtful act must have been a powerful, fun and rewarding experience—one I hope to be a part of in the future.

As a 2010 Michigan Economic Bright Spot, Oneupweb will continue to brighten the state while helping other businesses shine!