1. Get Ahead with Attention-Grabbing Headlines

Writing a whizbang headline may seem like a no-brainer, but the importance of this step cannot be overlooked. Think of your headline as your first impression, it’s the first piece of information your audience will receive and it’ll determine whether or not they read on. So, give these few words the attention they deserve; take time to brainstorm and take advantage of the opportunity to be creative. Choose a headline that is both informative and interesting.

2. Keep it Real with Original, Valuable Content

When writing for SEO, it’s important to focus not only keywords, but also on reader experience. Effective articles, blog posts and social media messages provide something of value to the readers. This means you’ll need to provide fresh—not copied—content that is credible, useful and interesting. Rather than focusing exclusively on your brand’s products or services, expand your topics to include those that would appeal to your audience’s interests. Quality content is clickable, shareable and enjoyable to read.

Go to Great Lengths for Substantial Articles

When it comes to writing for SEO, length is important. Ideally, content purposed for SEO should be between 300 and 1,000 words. Keep in mind, too, that one keyword should be introduces for every 50-100 words. Avoiding cramming your keywords together, though, as the readability and credibility of your content can suffer as a result. Instead, organize them throughout your content, so they appear more natural.

It’s part of our ongoing commitment to improve our client communications. In addition to building a great reporting platform, we have created a resource to educate our clients on the in’s and out’s of their on-going marketing campaign.

Out With The Old, In With The New

Our previous monthly progress reports were good, they included current rankings, traffic data, in-depth details on what has been completed, and everything we had planned coming up such as new content ideas, potential outreach opportunities, etc.

Our new reports still include the same data, but we’ve made it better, the data, the visualizations, the historical views, everything is better.

Here’s a few highlights of what’s new:

The Reporting Dashboard
The most obvious upgrade from our old reporting system is our upgrade from PDF reports that we would manually email clients at the end of every month. Our new web-based dashboard holds all of our reports in the cloud, allowing clients to login at any time to not only view current reports, but past reports also.

Historical Keyword Data, Updated Weekly
Our old reports we included a table full of current keyword data. Our new interactive keyword rank tracker is updated weekly, and we keep track of those updates. We’ve integrated with Google charts API to provide a visual view of how your rankings are improving on a weekly basis.

Live Google Analytics Data
We’ve integrated directly with Google Analytics to provide our clients with the best website traffic reporting available. We offer an in-depth view of all important website data such as bounce rate, time on site, top pages, page views, unique visitors, conversion goals, and total number of organic search visits.

Delivered Directly to Your Inbox Monthly
Our client reporting dashboard is accessible anywhere, and any time so our clients can login and view their reports whenever is best for them. But we still like to make sure you never miss a report, on the last day of the month we send out friendly reminders when our reports are built.

Emphasis on Results

The new client reporting dashboard places a priority on our commitment to better serve our clients by holding ourselves accountable for our results and ultimately providing a positive ROI.

Our new dashboard was a blast to develop, and we cant wait for our clients to start receiving their new reports come the end of the month!

Evolution of Aspartame

Falling Up Media hasn’t been around that long, but we’ve gone through our fair share of logo designs. While digging around for the ghosts of logos past at Falling Up Media, I found this:

The arrows point to where you're supposed to throw up.

Kind of gross, right? But let’s talk about how this logo is hurting itself before sending it to logo rehab:

1. - Bulky. You wouldn’t be able to conveniently stamp this boxy monstrosity anywhere.
2. - Icky Colors. Powder blue on a white background mixed with rusty orange is not appealing.
3. - What is that font?
4. - Why are the arrows all pointing to the center? Where are they going? This logo has no direction am I right?
5. - The jokes you make about it end up not even being that funny.
6. - Dang. This logo sure will put your printer through hell. Look at all those extra lines and all that fading. All those shades of color are going to be a pain for your printer.
7. - The font size and word coloration implies that the name is “Falling Media” and that “Up” is optional or irrelevant. The word “Up” essentially becomes an under-appreciated and confused middle child.

Thankfully that logo was never officially used, and other designs were considered.

We may have stuck with it if it had been bad enough to make the news.

But the design was scrapped. This is the logo that Falling Up Media has been using for the past year:

2011

It served us well for the past year, representing us on our website, our reports, and a few other places here and there on the Internet. It’s simpler, and uses better colors and fonts. But we weren’t sure if it was the logo for us.

2012

This new logo was designed by our friends and neighbors at Park&Co. The new logo uses a better shade of blue (Pantone: 7460c), cuts out the slight shading in the orignal logo, and drops the word “group.” And if necessary the word “Media” could always be removed without damaging the logo’s appearance.

The two logo designs are barely over a year apart, but they represent a completely different Falling Up Media. New clients, new successes, a new office and creative space, and three four new employees have crossed Falling Up’s path in the past year, and the new logo represents these changes.

The simplicity of the new logo makes it easier to put it anywhere in attractive and affordable ways.

Signs!

Windows!

Business Cards!

How many logo designs did your business go through before choosing one? Where do you use your logo?

The time zone change.

I was now chronologically distant from my Midwest crew. The Twitter followers, the Facebook friends, the blog readers, their schedule was out of sync with mine. How was I supposed to stay connected to them, especially when I was at work for eight hours of the day?

That’s when Buffer saved me.

Buffer is so simple that it works even for casual tweeters. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by HootSuite or SocialBro (both of which are fantastic), give Buffer a try.

Whenever you think of a clever tweet or want to share a bit of news or a link, you add it to the Buffer. Buffer will allow you to stack multiple tweets and then post them for you throughout the day. It looks a little like this:

I first started adding tweets to Buffer on a late night before going to bed. I woke up that morning to retweets and @ replies from my east coast pals who had already been awake for 3 hours. Success!

After using it for a few days I was rediscovering followers who I had forgotten were following.

The free version of Buffer shows if you’ve been retweeted and how many potential followers you’ve reached as a result, but a paid version will unlock other analytics like @ mentions and favorites. I use other applications to run analytics, and most stats are already on Twitter, but if you’re really into Buffer I’m sure it’s worth it.

You can also link your Buffer to Facebook to schedule statuses. There’s a mobile app, and it’s similar enough to the online version that there isn’t much to say about it.

Does Buffer work?

Yes, it absolutely works. And I’m not even being paid to say that. I noticed an instant increase in @ replies and retweets when using it. It also freed me from the anxiety that comes with neglecting your social media accounts when you’re doing real-life person things.

Results?

You know that Klout thing that we all claim is irrelevant but check obsessively? I saw that score increase by three points in just one week of use, which qualified me for some perks that I wouldn’t have been eligible for otherwise.

Free booze and DVDs? I’m in.

And to think Mom said blogging would never pay off.

Below we’ll guide you through a few of the statistics you’ll discover when using confetti mapping, and how you can use that information to optimize your website.

This time we’ll be returning to the website for Peak Performance Business Coaching.

New vs. Returning

We can see that a lot of the people signing up for the free coaching workout are returning visitors. Chances are these people are doing their research and comparing Peak Performance to other business coaching services in the Phoenix area before returning.

Referrer

Using these numbers you can find out where your visitors are coming from and who’s linking to your page. The most common referrers will include the website itself, search engines, and pages that link to your site. For example, if somebody recently mentioned your website in a blog post and linked to your site, you should see how many people came to your website through that link in your referrer statistics.

Search Terms

You can find more in-depth information on search terms with other services and applications, but this is a useful tool to see what people are clicking after using certain search terms. You’ll notice that direct traffic is more likely to visit the blog and other regularly updated sections of the site, while search engine traffic from less specific keywords is more likely to visit the About Peak page and other sections that provide information about what Peak Performance offers.

Search Engine

Most websites will see the majority of their search engine traffic coming from Google. This is why SEO experts frequently target Google search engine rankings over Yahoo! and Bing. Above you can compare Google’s 133 visitors to Yahoo’s 6 visitors.

Bing came in last with only 3 visitors. Bing is probably the only search engine to be released in 2009 that’s somehow stuck in 1999. It’s no surprise that Bing only yielded 3 search results, because nobody likes Bing. Not even Microsoft likes Bing.

Country

While not vital for Peak Performance, it’s useful for other businesses to be able to see what country their visitors are coming from. If a website isn’t receiving many foreign visitors, it may be difficult to navigate for foreign guests that use English as a second language. This is more important for businesses that sell and ship products internationally.

Day of the Week

Mondays are a big day for Peak Performance, and it’s expected to see a little less traffic on the weekends. By determining what days of the week receive the most traffic, Peak Performance will be able to see what they do on those days that works, and adapt their strategy to attempt to increase traffic on other days.

Time of Day

As soon as work let’s out, people start surfing the net, and it looks like a few of them found Peak Performance at around 5:30 PM. Using this data Peak Performance can determine the best times to post new content.

Time to Click

This one is interesting. It shows how long it took a visitor before they decided to click on a link on a website. This information can be used to determine what visitors are most interested in, what parts of a website aren’t appealing enough, and any areas that may be difficult to navigate. For example, we can see above that several visitors clicked to input their information for the free coaching workout within less than 20 seconds, so we know that the form is appealing and easy-to-find for visitors.

Your website is your party, and like any good host, you should take the time to get to know your guests.

What other ways would you use confetti mapping when analyzing a website?

We soon discovered all of this sudden attention was the fault of some cardboard miscreants.

They come early every morning, waving signs and shouting at the traffic driving down 44th Street near Indian School Avenue. At first we were worried. What had we done wrong to deserve this negative attention? How was this going to affect business? The last thing we needed was to be on the 5 o’ clock news with a yard full of vicious paper peasants chanting “Comic Sans is Sin.”

After several complaints to the police were ignored (they even had the nerve to laugh at us), we began to consider taking crowd control into our own hands and using the hose to put a soggy end to our squatters’ card stock shenanigans.

But then we got to know them.

As I spent time with them and listened to their message, I remembered the shouting matches I had with my own father over his use of IE6. My desperate attempts to get him to switch to a safer, faster browser fell on deaf ears. Day after day I watched with despair as he became more and more frustrated with his Internet browsing experience. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore, so I packed my bags and left Ohio, and I’ve been in Arizona ever since. I don’t even remember what IE6 looks like.

What we had originally assumed was a group of bored, unemployed vagabonds was in reality a dynamic crew of creatives. Freelancers, designers, writers, animators, programmers… people like us just searching for a better way to create.

Is #OccupyCoLab stirring up trouble? Is it disruptive to the day-to-day operations of a 9-5 world? Of course it is, but they’re doing it for all the right reasons.

Wherever there is a traditional office, an outdated website, a poor color choice, #OccupyCoLab will be there to put a stop to it. They refuse to tolerate creative bankruptcy.

The Falling Up team has joined the creative revolution. Will you?

Visit the Occupy CoLab website to learn more about the creative spaces available. Photos courtesy of @casaundra.

The Internet is a jungle. It’s beautiful and rich with resources, but also difficult to navigate and full of animals that want to poison and/or eat you. It’s constantly evolving, and if you don’t evolve with it you’ll find yourself prey to a faster, more adapted predator.

So how do you make sure your business survives out there?

When you’re in the wild, you need to be acutely aware of your surroundings, and at the same time, stealthy.

Wait, that sounds a lot like…

Would you be interested in being a patron of my business?

But how do you make sure your visitors are going where you want them to go? Treat the viewers of the Internet as soliders. Viewers of the Internet are experts at ignoring advertising and marketing efforts, equipping themselves with the back button and even creating counter-campaigns against marketing efforts they disapprove of. You’re up against the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers, and they aren’t just going to fall for any website. You’ll need to reel them in without them realizing it’s a trap. You can track your website’s visitors with heat vision just like Predator.

Don’t believe me? Take a look:

This is a heat map. The one above is made courtesy of a tool by CrazyEgg. It shows what parts of a website receive the most clicks. Analyzing a heat map reveals what parts of a website are “hot” and sought after, and which ones are “cold” and need improvement. By generating a heat map of multiple pages on a website it’s possible to determine the general flow of traffic.

This heat map features the homepage of one of our clients and neighbors, Peak Performance Business Coaching.

By looking at the homepage, we can come to a few conclusions:

1). The sign up section for a free coaching workout is drawing attention. People are signing up, so we can conclude that its current layout and placement on the page is successful.

2). The button for the book Coach to Win the Leadership Game, is not being used. This tells us that we need to make a change. Our current suggestion is to allow visitors to read a free chapter of the book, and make a call to action statement encouraging them to read it. This should draw more viewers to the book.

3). The buttons for Coaches, About Peak, and Blog are popular. This tells us what visitors are looking for. They want to know about the business and the faces behind it, and they’re interested in what the blog has to offer.

4). The buttons for Monthly Workouts and In the News are not popular. These buttons aren’t being used to their potential. We’ve concluded that it is because these sections are rarely updated. We’ve suggested updating these sections more frequently or moving the content to a different part of the website.

5). @petewalsh is followed, @familybizcoach isn’t. Towards the bottom of the page there is a call to action to follow two separate twitter accounts. Only one of those buttons is being pursued. We’ve determined that as the family business coaching branch of the Peak Performance brand is developed, the @familybizcoach call to action should be moved to a more relevant part of the site.

By performing a heat map analysis of every page on your website, we can optimize it to keep visitors interested website for as long as possible, keep them coming back, and most importantly, guide them into interacting with your content.

Do you guys feel strangely compelled to buy Pete Walsh's book or is it just me?

Heat mapping is just one of the tools available to track visitors. What tools do you use most?

Your friends and coworkers have been pining over Pinterest for months, and you’ve decided that it’s time to learn what this Pinterest website is all about before you’re pinned as the person who just doesn’t “get” Pinterest.

But you can’t just go firing up an account and start pinning willy-nilly. Otherwise you’ll end up with a board titled “Pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal Eating Salad” or “Betty White Saying Funny Things Gallery” and look like a total psycho stalker.

Not that I know from experience.

Or more embarrassing, you’ll join a conversation about Pinterest with coworkers and say you “poked a recipe to your wall.” That’s the kind of social gaffe that takes minutes, sometimes hours for people to forget. Sure by lunch people may stop teasing, but deep down you know they’ll always remember you as the person who used Facebook terms during a Pinterest discussion. That’s the kind of stigma that’s hard to live with.

So educate yourself! For starters you can check out obvious resources like AdWeek or LinkedIn, but we’ve listed some of the most entertaining and humorous articles below.

1). Why Pinterest is Like Black Tar Heroin
For an introduction to Pinterest, trust humorist and early-adapter Brittany Gibbons, who wrote this guide to Pinterest in July 2011 before most people had even heard of it.

2). The Bro’s Guide to Pinterest
“I secretly love all these inspirational quotes and savory recipes, but I’m a dude! How can I use Pinterest to show that I love cars, sports, and bachelor pads?” Ryan Sammy steps up to the plate to show how guys can use Pinterest and keep that machismo with The Bro’s Guide to Pinterest.

3). Pinning May Be Sinning
If you’re more interested in playing devil’s advocate, Phoenix’s very own and appropriately named Phoenix Real Estate Guy takes an opposing stance to Pinterest, explaining his qualms with the popular website and whether or not it truly contributes to the growth of a business. Learn why, for him, pinning may be sinning.

4). Pinterest: The Depths We Will Go to Not Read
So you’ve introduced yourself to Pinterest. You’ve learned why it’s interesting, how businesses are using it to their advantage, and some of the current concerns people have expressed. But what are the cool kids and hipsters saying? Writer Brian Donovan brings his opinion to Pinterest in this article, using a combination of sardonic humor and social commentary that e-zine Thought Catalog has become known for.

Are you pining for Pinterest yet? Then get that invite, set up your account, and start pinning!

Just avoid making a “Recipes for Homemade Ointments that Clear Up My Rashes” board.

That’s how rumors get started.

Did we miss your favorite Pinterest articles? Did you write one yourself? Let us know in the comments below.

WordCamp Phoenix is an event the team loves getting involved with every year. This year Falling Up Media was fortunate enough to be tasked with designing the WordCamp Phoenix webpage.

Co-Founder Cody preferred taking notes on his laptop to collect new ideas for future Falling Up Media projects.

Co-Founder Casey invested his time in filming events and interviews throughout the day. Expect to see more footage on WordCamp Phoenix’s YouTube page.

Me? I had almost too much fun tweeting and meeting others with the #wcphx hashtag, especially during Sara Cannon’s Design Swoon session.

Comic Sans is the creepy uncle of fonts, trying to appeal to children but really just making everyone uncomfortable. #DesignSwoon #wcphx

— Justin (@JustinRHoffman) February 25, 2012

After the closing remarks, our team made our way to Chandler hotspot SanTan Brewery for burgers and drinks before heading to the after party.

Of course it wouldn’t be WordCamp without the after party, which gave attendees a chance to meet and chat with the presenters of the day, and more importantly, show off their dance moves. Hosted by the City of Chandler at Chandler City Hall, the event came complete with hors d’oeuvres, drinks, games, and music. We were thrilled to meet and greet with some of the presenters we had admired throughout the day.

You would think that with all of the analytics we run we would have been able to play the odds at the roulette table. You would be wrong.

We lost all of our chips within the first five minutes.

When Sunday came around our very own Cody Helgeson presented, enlightening guests on custom post types.

Just like last year, the Falling Up Media team had a blast participating in WordCamp, and can’t wait to see what next year brings for the WordPress community.

Until then, press on Phoenix!

What comes to mind when you come across a dull 404 page? WTF comes to my mind, which more than likely leads to a click on the good ole’ back button!

A 404 error basically tells you that you were able to connect to the server, but was unable to find what it was looking for. 404 pages are visible to a user who either followed a dead link or typed a wrong URL in the address bar. We have all seen the “Top 50 Creative 404 Pages” posts before, dont worry – this isn’t one of them! Lets talk about how you can make a valuable 404 page, and how to capitalize on any link opportunities you might not even know you have!

What should you do with your 404 pages? Some experts recommend 301 redirecting your 404 page to the homepage, I disagree. Redirecting traffic to another page what may not have the content the user was hoping for can be worse than a 404 page.

Create a Valuable 404 Page

We have all seen the attempts at “funny” 404 pages, good for a quick laugh and a quick bounce! So what goes into making a valuable 404 page? Assuming your using a modern CMS like WordPress your 404 page should already be setup. In WordPress you can modify your 404 page by editing “404.php” in your theme folder.

Capture the users attention and get straight to the point! Let the user know they are on a 404 page, but be creative with your word choice to make them stick around for a second.

Explain why the page is showing up, include what may have gone wrong, either they followed a bad link or typed in the wrong URL. Let them know there was a mistake with that specific URL, not your whole site. Ask the user to help by adding a quick link to “report this page to the webmaster“.

Provide useful links to popular pages on your website. Think about the most valuable sections or pages on your website to link to, just keep it short and sweet and dont forget a link to your contact page. Do you have an ecommerce website? This is a great opportunity to show your popular items.

Analyze Your 404 Pages

Now that you have a decent 404 page, open up Google Webmaster Tools and navigate to the crawl errors page. From here you are able to see any crawl errors Google has encountered, which is pretty accurate! There are 4 columns: URL, Detail, Linked From, & Detected.

Now you can easily see your error pages and incoming links to these pages. If you have just a few URL’s showing up, you can check the “linked from” column to find any incoming links to your error pages. If you have quite a few error pages, click the “Download all sources of errors on this site” link to download a spreadsheet of all of your 404 URL’s and the URL’s linking to your error pages.

Turn Your 404 Pages Into Opportunities

Now since we have our list of broken URL’s and dead links lets capitalize on these opportunities! There are a number of things you can do to create good from your 404 pages, including:

Build or rebuild content to take advantage of the incoming links. If you have a large number of sites linking to a broken URL its a good idea to develop a page around it. Re-build the page with relevant content to take advantage of any incoming links.

Ask linking sites to change the link pointing to your site. Reach out to the webmasters linking to you and let them know the page has either moved or they have it misspelled.

301 redirect broken URL’s to a relevant page. Check your list, do you see any URL’s that look like they could be related to existing content on your site? 301 redirect them to pass on any existing link juice. Any random, weird or irrelevant URL’s you can redirect to the homepage. Redirecting these pages will also remove the error from Google Webmaster Tools since you are letting Google know you have moved the page.

These 404 Pages Get The Job Done!

37 Signals does a great job of explaining the problem, and provides visual links to all of their products

Carsonified’s creative design and typography keep you interested all while directing your eye to relevant links

AWESOME! Distilled’s 404 page uses a creative illustration explaining the error and what to do next!

You can search for a hotel on hotels.com 404 page. Not looking for a hotel? They also provide links to other pages on their site

KISSmetrics keeps it simple. Classic example of a helpful 404 page