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.

Today, I launched my own URL shortening service called xURLs

and I’m going to show you how you can easily create your own too.  But first, here’s a little background about URL shortening and why it’s an important aspect of your social media, affiliate marketing, press release, and even search engine optimization strategy.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with URL shortening, here’s a quick example of when you may want to chop a long URL down to something smaller.  Let’s say you want to post a link to a specific page on a shopping website for home office furniture in your tweet on Twitter. Unfortunately, the URL you want to include is 133 characters long which doesn’t leave space to talk about much else in your tweet.  You can reduce the length of the link by submitting it a URL shortening service which outputs a shorter URL that takes the user to the same exact page for you to use in your tweet, as in the example below:

Original URL (133 characters): http://www.thehomeofficedepot.com/shop.php?c=500&n=1069102&i=B00252CGL2&x=Cherry_Finish_Home_Office_Corner_
Workstation_Computer_Desk

New Short URL (17 characters): http://xurls.us/3

As you can see, the new URL is 116 characters shorter than the original link, resolves to the exact same pages, and is now Twitter friendly.

Lately, I have been doing a lot with Twitter and affiliate marketing.  In doing so, I’ve come to recognize the importance of “URL control” in posting links on social media networks and within my own affiliate promotional pieces.  There are many services out there that allow people to shorten URLs.  The most well known of these websites are bit.ly and TinyURL, but there are tons of others, each with its own unique features.

It occurred to me that given the relative simplicity of these services that it would be easy to set-up and host my own URL shortening/redirection services using a domain I own.  Having my own URL reduction website gives me the ability to shorten URLs, incorporate keywords of my choosing, view click statistics and user information, set my own redirection rules, and add advertising.  In other words, as a web marketer, I now have the ability to abbreviate links with custom characteristics while gaining valuable analytical insight.

Steps To Create Your Own Domain Redirection Service

What follows is a basic overview of how to get your URL shortening website up and running pretty quickly.

1.  Find the shortest available domain name you can

I’ve been using Bustaname.com to help find some very good unregistered website domain names for a while now.  It was Bustaname.com that enable me to find xURLs.us (the URL for my domain name shortening service) which is a beautifully short and descriptive 8 character (including the period) domain name.  Many URL reduction websites use exotic two-letter, top level domains (TLD) like .al, .cc, .ly.  These are great because they are shorter than the classic “.com” TLD, but they can cost you anywhere from $10 – $90 to reserve.  Please note: many of country-specific TLDs have special criteria that must be met in order to reserve them.  You can also use the little domain availability tool below to quickly check if a website name is available. 

Once you’ve settled on a short domain name, the next step is to register it.  I use 1&1 Internet for domain registration.  It’s quick, easy, and cheap.  Others may prefer www.GoDaddy.com .

2.  Get reliable hosting

Most of the URL shortening services I came across researching this project are built upon PHP and MySQL, so I’d recommend a server host that comes with these two already installed.  Again, I use 1&1 Internet for server hosting, but you should use the web host you feel most comfortable using.

3.  Select a URL shortening script

It seems to be fairly easy for experienced web programmers to write their own custom URL redirection script, but why reinvent the wheel?  There are a few dozen free URL shortening scripts out there and some paid applications for you to select from.

xURLs is built upon a simple PHP script called Yourls.  I chose Yourls as my redirection platform because it’s free, has an easy installation, a straightforward admin interface, and a decent statistics package.

The admin console for Yourls:

The stat package in Yourls:

Some other URL shortening scripts include: Kissa.be, Shorty, and TightURL.

Each script has its own mini-URL creation procedures.  For example, some present the target page in an iframe of a dynamically generated page, while others use a 301 HTTP redirect or even a Meta refresh as the mechanism to get users to the intended page.  Some scripts allow you to create multiple mini-URLs which point to a single long URL.  You should demo, research, and analyze how each script works and select the one that fits your needs.

4.  Install and customize the shortening script

Next, after you have selected a domain shortening script, you’ll need to install it in your web host environment.  You should review the installation documentation for the specific URL shortening script you selected, but for the most part they all involve roughly the same steps:  (1)create a SQL database (2)populate database connection parameters in a PHP set-up file (3)toggle settings in a configuration file (4)upload the files for the URL shortening application to your web server via FTP (5)initiate an installation/customization script.

If you’re using Yourls, you should review its installation instructions and this important note about installing Yourls on a 1&1 web server.  Also, some of you may not want your URL shortening service to be available for public use.  In this case, you will need to password protect your website.  Yourls allows you to do this quickly by changing the line “define(‘YOURLS_PRIVATE’, true);” in the config-sample.php to “true”.

As a nice little feature to get your started, Yourls includes a file called sample-public-front-page.php.txt to give you an idea about how to construct the homepage for your URL shortening website.  You can customize the contents of this file to your liking.  When you’re finished designing your homepage, change the file name to index.php and upload it to the root directory of your website.  I’d recommend designing a decent looking homepage and installing visitor tracking (i.e. Google Analytics, GoStats) for your URL reduction website – you never know when curious users may come-a-knocking.

5.  Start posting your short links

Now that your URL redirection script is up and running under your own domain, it’s time to start posting your short links on Twitter, Facebook, and your own affiliate websites.  Here’s an image of xURLs, my own URL chopping website, at work in the wild.

If you want to see something amazing, try posting a link routed through your URL shortening/redirection service in a tweet and immediately jump over to the statistics screen and watch how fast the clicks accumulate.

A few minutes ago, I saw something on TV I don’t think I’ve ever seen before – a nonpolitical commercial that advocates a plan to detoxify this country from its dependence on foreign oil.  Have a look-see for yourself.  Although, I instantly recognized the old fellow in the video as mega-billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens – this being the election season – I still expected to hear the phrase “Paid for by supporters of ____”.  Imagine my surprise when no such endorsement came (did you feel the same way?).  Curious to find out more information about the so called “PickensPlan”, I jumped over to PickensPlan.com and did some clicking around.

Now, regardless of what you may think about T. Boone Pickens as a human being, or his political beliefs, business practices or philanthropy, you have to admire the way he (or his online marketing agency) is putting the power of Internet social media to work.  It’s all there right down to the web 2.0 blue color scheme of the website.  With chicklets leading to every social media network that matters, a video blog, a forum, badges for webmasters to post to their site, he’s making savvier use of social media elements than a group of teenage girls the day after a high school prom.  And this is exactly how it’s supposed to be done.

I’m willing to bet Mr. Pickens’ social media blitz won’t play any small role in getting people to do verbs such as write, organize, and collaborate once they’ve viewed the print and television commercials.  Despite budgeting nearly $60 million to promote his plan, the site has all the look and feel of a true online grassroots movement. The main page is designed as a gateway to get people interested and educated about the PickensPlan, while offsite islands of social networking pages on Facebook and MySpace serve to help new evangelist spread the message to members of their personal network.  It’s hub marketing.  Pretty clever.  I urge folks not to be so quick to chalk this up as an act of charity from a kind old businessman who has had a good run and now wants to do something good for the rest of us.  Pickens’ company has a considerable amount to gain if the plan comes to fruition. However, I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say fossil fuel won’t last forever.

Here’s the PickensPlan in case you were wondering what all the hype is about:

You have to appreciate how I used the word “social” twice in the title.

I heard these two stories on NPR (“On The Media”) over the weekend, and they so tied psychology and sociology to interactive buzz marketing that I had to share them here.  Give them a listen, before you read on.

Peruse any job board for positions relating to interactive marketing and almost always under the desired education requirement you’ll see computer science, IT, business administration, or the narrower disciplines of marketing and public relations.  It seems the interactive marketing community as a whole has severely underestimated the application of a social science degree to an online marketing career.  My undergraduate degrees are in psychology and sociology, and on more than one occasion I have found myself explaining how my training in the social sciences is applicable to a career in marketing.

To me it’s not a big leap; to others it’s implausible.  When people think about psychology, they picture a comfortable room with two people – one sitting in an arm chair taking notes, and the other laying on his back spilling his guts while paying $200 an hour for the privilege to do so.  I didn’t pick psychology out of the list of majors to become a clinical psychologist like the one in this example.  I could care less about a stranger’s relationship with his or her mother.  I started in the field with the desire to become an experimental psychologist and through empirical hypothesis testing I wanted to explore the mysteries of human behavior and mental processes.  If it helps, picture a guy in a white lab coat holding a clipboard observing people through a two-way mirror.

Similarly, I find that people are often misinformed about what sociology involves.  They confuse the discipline with social work or social advocacy when in fact sociology is nowhere as benevolent.  Sociology, in brief, is about investigating the behavior of groups and their interrelationship with the individual.  I have even argued that marketing is a hybrid of applied sociology and business administration, given marketing’s high level goal of influence and persuasion.  It’s pretty well accepted that the multibillion dollar a year industry of market research is a type of applied sociology.

You’d be hard pressed to find someone active in online marketing that would dispute the statement that social media is where it’s at.  With big brands flocking to Facebook and MySpace to transform latent customers in to brand advocates, interactive marketing firms are scrambling to adopt in this new environment.  As much in SEO or PPC, if not more so, interactive marketers that practice social media channel development must ask questions like:

1. How do we influence customers to buy our products?
2. How do we influence customers to promote our brand?
3. How do we enter into a new online community and interact with members effectively?
4. How do we leverage these social networks to create buzz?
5. How do we encourage long term retention in our customers
6. What are our customers saying to us?
7. How do we respond?
8. How do we track the reach of our message?

To my ears, at their core, these are social science questions, not computer science questions.  How companies can actually leverage observations from social science research to generate ROI is the business marketing extension of each of the questions listed above.  Unless marketers first try to understand the questions (and answers) above in the light of the specific community they aspire to influence, they will not be successful in their efforts to generate ROI.  Just because a community or culture exists online, doesn’t make it less of a community or culture.  A person trained in psychology and sociology may be more effective in uncovering deep insights about the types of people behind the screen names used on social networking/media websites than a person with a traditional marketing background.  For example, during my undergraduate years, I took classes in community psychology, social psychology, social problems, psychological anthropology, and methodology of social research.  The sum of all these courses was a solid background in how to systematically dissect, investigate, and influence the inner workings of a community.

Although, I relied on the social media example to make my argument, a social science degree is strongly conducive to success in other areas of online marketing.  In conclusion, folks with psychology and sociology backgrounds have taken courses relating to influence, motivation, perception, group dynamics, cultural studies, demographics, statistical analysis, survey design, consumer psychology, and research – all of which are important in Internet marketing.