Download the Internet Marketing Guide for Nonprofits in PDF format

Today, as an accompaniment to the start of New England’s GiveCamp weekend in which I will be participating, I am releasing A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing: Cost-Effective Opportunities to Accelerate Online Marketing Success for Your Nonprofit. This is a 15-page guide designed to help nonprofit organizations activate or to accelerate their online marketing efforts. The Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing contains information about:

• Why nonprofits should consider Internet marketing and how it can help to expand membership rolls, event participation, donation collection, and to increase awareness
• A brief overview of the main disciplines within online marketing and how nonprofits cans get started, including search engine optimization (SEO), paid search marketing (pay-per-click) , and social media marketing (SMM)
• Specific programs offered by companies like Google and Flickr to assist nonprofits in marketing online
• Additional opportunities within emarketing and a brief look at how to implement each grassroots style
• Guidelines for vetting and working with online marketing agencies

The guide is totally free, but if you like it kindly donate to any of the charities that will be present at New England GiveCamp. Here’s the list of nonprofits scheduled to attend the event.

Also, if you know a nonprofit or charity that can use this guide, please feel free to share a copy of it with them or refer them to this site.

If you have any questions about the content of this document, please feel free to comment to this post and I reply there. If you are looking to retain my services for any of the online marketing programs mentioned, please use this form to contact me.

Here’s a questions from my friend Diana at Ustandout.com, a great site that offers social media and internet marketing tips.  She had just migrated her blog from an IIS server to a Linux box.  In doing so, she had to change the URL structure of her site, which caused an important inbound link to Ustandout.com to break.

Question:

“Originally, my blog was hosted on my dad’s IIS server, and the links all read http://ustandout.com/index.php/blog-post-name. After transferring the blog to a linux server, we created an .htaccess file to redirect all http://ustandout.com/index.php/blog-post-name to http://ustandout.com/blog-post-name.

Over the weekend, I transferred my U Stand Out blog from my dad’s server to my own GoDaddy-hosted linux server (I figured it was time to take control of my own hosting, haha). The .htaccess file is still there. However, external sites linking to my blog via the original link (/index.php/blog-post-name) no longer work.

As an example, Mashable was linking to one of my blog posts: http://ustandout.com/twitter/free-twitter-badges, but their link reads http://ustandout.com/index.php/twitter/free-twitter-badges, so it doesn’t work. I was getting tons of traffic from this one mention, and now I’m not.

So I know you have experience with redirects, and I just don’t know enough about this kind of thing to research and find a solution (trust me, I’ve tried, and I broke my whole site for a while haha). Do you have any idea how I can make /index.php/blog-post-name redirect to /blog-post? Any help would be much appreciated, but if you’re too busy to think about this I understand!!

Diana”

My Reply:

“Diana, As far as your question goes – here are my thoughts:

If I’m understanding you correctly, it seems like you implemented a general redirect rule using regular expressions in your .htaccess file that only works for a specific URL format. It only redirects all http://ustandout.com/index.php/blog-post-name to http://ustandout.com/blog-post-name.

The link from Mashable also links to you /twitter/ directory which doesn’t seem to be covered by your existing 301 redirect rules. I’d recommend creating a custom 301 redirect rules that works specifically on the URL that is linked to from Mashable. In other words, try adding this:

redirect 301 /index.php/twitter/free-twitter-badges http://ustandout.com/index.php/twitter/free-twitter-badges

But assuming this works, it doesn’t solve your problem site-wide. So, if you send my your .htaccess file maybe I can take a look at it.

Be well,
Everett”

Follow Up

Diana added the line of code to her .htaccess file and it solved the problem.  Issue resolved.

Have A Questions?

If anyone out there has any questions, SEO-related or otherwise, please shoot me a line and I will do my best to help you.