Enlightened Owl Digital

09/21/2020

Have a look at the new website we recently launched for Wolf & Cardinal, a photo retouching studio based in Austin, Texas that specializes in photo manipulation, compositing, color correction and restoration! https://wolfandcardinal.com

Enlightened Owl Digital is Austin's full service website design agency for small businesses with big goals. Affordable, fast, and local! Contact us for a free consultation & no obligation quote.

09/18/2020

Thank you Wolf + Cardinal for the kind words. It was a pleasure working with you on this project. Check it out at https://wolfandcardinal.com.

07/14/2020

Take a peek at the new ecommerce website we recently launched for Trulevia, a boutique marketplace for CBD products in Dripping Springs! https://trulevia.com/

08/10/2015

If you're collecting email addresses from your customers and leads (and you SHOULD BE), then something that is frequently overlooked is the importance of cleansing those lists those inactive subscribers.

When you don't routinely cleanse your list, it not only needlessly costs you more money whenever you send out email communications, but it can have a HUGE negative effect on deliverability across the board. When you send emails out to users that don't exist, it can cause spam filters to stop delivering your emails to the users it protects. Even if you are sending emails to valid addresses, if the people you're sending them to aren't opening them, then you're basically poking them with a stick until they mark one of your emails as spam or junk. If this happens with more than 1% of your emails, spam filters will give you a smack and you can have a VERY tough time getting your email messages through to ANYONE.

Here is a great discussion on the topic by the super smart folks at MarketingSherpa:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7WEMIp-cb0

In this interview from MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Courtney Eckerle, Reporter, MarketingSherpa, discussed with Jeffrey Anderson, Digital Marketing Man...

08/09/2015

If you haven't heard of Slack, you may be the last one who hasn't. Slack is a team-messaging application that went from founding to a BILLION dollar value in a little over a year - faster than either Groupon or Twitter.

During an "Ask Me Anything" video interview, Slack's Chief Marketing Officer opened up about how word of mouth, conversion optimization, and a relentless focus on the online user experience have been keys to their stratospheric growth and success - all things that can send YOUR BUSINESS in the right direction fast too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU7dpagKP7M

Bill Macaitis is CMO of Slack, the platform for team communication and the fastest growing enterprise software product in the history of enterprise software....

08/08/2015

This is an interesting piece on CNN about the incredible impact web testing has had on recent successful presidential campaigns. You'll see how something as simple as changing the text on a button from "Sign Up" to "Learn More", and using a black and white photo, increased email subscribers by 40%. What would that sort of increase in leads do for YOUR business? If you need help getting starting with this type of website and marketing optimization, just let us know.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/29/technology/optimizely-presidential-candidates/index.html

Candidates are using Optimizely to personalize their websites and messages -- helping to maximize donations and volunteers.

08/08/2015

Yesterday I posted about UTM parameters and explained why and how business owners use them to improve their marketing effectiveness. You saw that once a link is created with UTM tags, it can get pretty long and goofy looking, which often doesn't matter because the link itself isn't being displayed, but sometimes the person viewing your content actually CAN see the link and when that's the case you may want to show them a link that is shorter and "prettier".

Easy breezy. Just go to either the Google URL Shortener or Bitly below, paste your long hideous link into the tool, and they will give you a nice short one to use instead. Problem solved!

https://bitly.com/

https://goo.gl/

Get the most out of your social and online marketing efforts. Own, understand and activate your best audience through the power of the link with Bitly Brand Tools.

08/07/2015

In case you didn't already know, back in February Google and Twitter agreed to a partnership that would give Google access to the stream of Tweets known as the "firehose".

This is pretty big news, but what does it mean for website owners?

The short answer is, we don't really know yet. What we DO know is that search is becoming increasingly intertwined with social media and that makes understanding how to use it correctly and having the tools and technology on your website to be able to take advantage of it all more important than ever.

Twitter's firehouse steams about 9,000 Tweets per SECOND, and Google has already begun to collect and index those Tweets to display in search results to produce more timely and relevant results for the user, and they may also be using the data to improve their ranking algorithm for existing search results, or soon will.

It will take some time for things to shake out, but assuming Tweets will be made more widely available through Google search results, it will sure make how many Twitter followers you have a lot less meaningful since what you Tweet will be available to everyone, whether they're following you or not. That's not to say that Google won't also need to rank the Tweets it returns and would likely use Follower count as part of that algorithm, but it would be a lot less clear cut than it is now.

The take-away is that if you're not using Twitter now and integrating it with your website, you better change that QUICK.

08/07/2015

Back in March, Google made this announcement which threw people with outdated crummy websites into an understandable panic:

"Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results."

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2015/02/finding-more-mobile-friendly-search.html

Was there really cause for alarm over what is now being called “Mobilegeddon”, or was it all just a big overreaction? Now that things have shaken out a bit, we can analyze what the impact truly has been, and the bottom line is that if your website still isn't "mobile-friendly" by Google's defined standards, you're not going to enjoy the next few minutes…

Marketing Land found websites losing up to 35% of their mobile search rankings http://marketingland.com/mobilegeddon-hits-misses-130480

Another study found that HALF of the websites that didn't meet the mobile standards dropped in rank https://www.stonetemple.com/mobilegeddon-may-have-been-bigger-than-we-thought/

Researchers who analyzed 1,000 popular keyword terms said, "We found that 83% of the time, the top result is tagged as mobile-friendly by Google. 81% of the time the top 3 results are mobile-friendly. And when you consider all ten of the spots on Google’s first page, 77% of the search results are “mobile-friendly."
http://moovweb.com/blog/mobile-friendly-sites-dominate-google-search-results/

If your website is outdated or hasn't been optimized for mobile users, the message from Google is clear - the time to change and start taking your website seriously is NOW.

When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly web pages or apps. As more people use mobile devices to access the internet, our algorithms have to adapt to these usage patterns. In the past, we’v…

08/07/2015

If you're driving traffic to your website from a variety of channels, such as Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or others, it's critically important that you track what converts and what doesn't if you ever hope to market effectively online.

One way you can accomplish this is by using what are known as UTM tags, also know as UTM parameters, which give you the ability to add a unique tag to the end of your URL so you can track your traffic by the source it originates from.

You've probably already seen links with these UTM's - they have a question mark at the end of URL and then what looks like a bunch of mumbo jump after it, like this:

https://enlightenedowl.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_term=betterurls&utm_content=image1&utm_campaign=EO42

The thing is, all that mumbo jumbo actually makes sense to the person who created it. For example, when people reading this post click on that link I can track where they came from and what post in particular they are responding to. This would let me know easily see how responsive my traffic is on Facebook when compared to something like Twitter for instance. I could then track it even further and see how many conversions each source generates so I can figure out the value of each click and therefore what I can profitably spend on PPC ads, or whether the energy I'm putting into a particular channel is worth it.

You can create links with UTM tags through Google’s free URL builder.

All you need to do is:

1) Put the page you want to send people to under “Website URL.”

2) Choose a source. This is place the traffic will be coming from (such as Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc).

3) Choose a medium. This identifies what specifically generated the traffic, such as a particular ad, image or piece of content.

4) Choose a name. This name is for your own tracking purposes and so each campaign has a unique identifier (for example: back to school promo code, blue widget product launch, holiday sale, etc).

Then just copy and paste it and use it for the piece of content you want to track. Now you'll be able to identify those specific clicks and what impact they have through your analytics tool of choice, such as Google Analytics.