Eight Ways To Improve Your Website

Blog Strategically
If you don’t have a blog attached to your website, now is the time to set one up.

Log on to WordPress and create a blog for free. Then, link the blog to your website or incorporate it by adding an extra page to your toolbar.

Why? The WordPress platform offers unique SEO advantages – right out of the box, automatically. No need for a pricey SEO expert. Save money!

Now that your blog is set up, what will you write about?

Write Q&As on influencers in your industry.  If you’re launching an accounting firm, reach out to accounting professors in your area and ask to interview them. Ask them about the latest accounting trend or related news, and transcribe the interviews into blog posts. Ask the professors to link their own Facebook pages or websites to your post to give you more exposure.

Try to blog at least three times a week, writing 500 to 750 words per post. You don’t have to interview influencers in each post. Write about current events through the lens of your business expertise. You might even attract journalists looking for a credible expert to comment on a news story.

You can also write up case studies. If you see someone in your industry doing something interesting, call and ask for an interview. Chances are they’ll be thrilled to get the publicity and the two of you can cross-promote.

Incorporate Video
Adding video to a website has never been easier. Just take a smartphone or Flip video camera (available for about $70) and start recording. Begin with a welcome video that explains what your business is about and introduces you as the owner. Put the video on YouTube or Vimeo and upload it to your homepage.

Consider posting a video blog every few weeks. Focus on a topic area you’re passionate about or ask a client to give an on-camera testimonial. Interview industry thought leaders and record how-to videos.

For The Video Challenged
Consider Animoto  (free & pro) … a slick video slideshow creation service that allows photographers, businesses, and consumers to make professional quality videos from their photos and video clips.

Offer Free Resources In Exchange For Emails
Post valuable information and you may snag a client for life. Create a box on your homepage called “Free Resources.” Write a list of useful information and save it in PDF format.

For example, if you are a home designer, make a checklist for people to run through before choosing a color palette. If you’re an accountant, create a checklist of documents needed to prepare taxes accurately.

Post the downloadable PDF in your Free Resources box, and allow downloads only if viewers subscribe to your e-mail newsletter.

The exchange is important. It allows a business owner to build a direct line to potential customers. Just make sure to change out resources often. You don’t want your website to look like a brochure where there is no reason to go back.

Register With Business-Listing Sites
Discoverability is vital to the success of a small business website. Entrepreneurs should register business sites on Yelp and Yahoo Local. Try Bing Local and Google Places. This will help your search engine optimization (SEO) and also validate your existence to customers searching for your services.

Add Social Media Sharing Tools
Have you noticed how every article on The New York Times website gives you the option to Tweet it and share it on your Facebook page? This helps to spread the word about articles and brands.

Every time you type a search term into Google, the first few links that appear are related items shared by people in your network. Adding sharing tools on your site broadens your reach to potential customers.

Offer Daily Or Weekly Deals
As a consumer, nothing catches my eye more than a great deal. Try offering a daily or weekly deal that is exclusive for your online customers and publicize it on your homepage. Talk to your customers in person about these deals, too.

Do what you can to blur your offline and online business worlds. Consider doing merchandising that promotes your website, along with an incentive to go there.

Pay Attention To Keywords
The better your search-engine ranking, the better your potential to capture more page views and more customers.  How do you cement yourself on Google’s first page?

Pay attention to the Google Keywords Tool. Run a few searches for words that describe your business. The tool will tell you what keywords perform well in search and the ones that don’t. Incorporate popular words into your site to increase your ranking.”

Watch Your Analytics
Check out your website stats and you might be surprised by what you find. Register for Google Analytics and you’ll be able to see which blog posts are doing best on your site, what keywords are bringing up your homepage and which pages are getting the most clicks. These stats will help guide you in creating more content that is meaningful to your audience.

Flickr lights up your Blackberry

Flickr.com, in case you didn’t know, is an online photo repository, now part of Yahoo, and an incredibly popular site for sharing photos, creating galleries, linking to your blog and websites.

It is the often overlooked little web 2.0 tool you need for your business.

Adding your photos to Flickr

First step: Get your photos into the service. If you’re not keen on downloading a piece of software, Flickr lets you upload six individual photos at a time. This might work for some weekend shots, but if you’ve got more than 20 shots it’s worth trying out the batch uploader. We recommend using the downloader software, or if you’ve got Yahoo’s Widgets Engine installed, the latest version comes with a widget that doubles as a photo viewer and uploading tool.

Tagging and organizing. Once your photos have been uploaded, you don’t need to rely on titles or folders to sort them, as you do with most other sharing sites. Instead you use tags: short identifiers you can later use to categorize and search for photos. Sorting by tags lets you create sets on the fly–of just your pictures, or yours plus the community’s.

Geotagging. Geotagging is a special method of tagging photos with their location. To geotag any photo, just click “Place this photo on a map” under the Additional information box on the right-hand side of your photograph. This will pull up a new interface with a large map. The easiest way to add the location is to type it into the search box in the top right-hand corner. The built-in search isn’t as forgiving as your average search engine, so if you can’t remember the address, try looking it up on Google and pasting it in. Once you’ve found your spot, just drag your photo from the bottom of the screen to where the map pointer is.

Sets on top, collections on bottom. Collections are just groups of sets, clumped together.

Sets. There are a few ways to create a set, the easiest is clicking the Add to set button on top of any photo. Flickr will show you a drop-down list of any other sets you’ve created, along with an option on the top that lets you create a new set. Give it a name and a description and you’re done. If you want to add multiple photos to a set, click the Organize button on the top menu on any page on Flickr, then select, “Your sets and collections.” Pick whatever set you want to add your photos to or make a new one. All your photos reside on the bottom of the screen, so scroll around to find the ones you want and just drag and drop them in the large area above. When you’re done, just click Save.

Collections. Flickr introduced this feature recently, and it allows users to put several sets together into one group. This would come in handy if you went on vacation, as you could create individual sets for each location, and then group them together as a collection.

Community
Sharing. Flickr is all about sharing. The reason it has tagging and notating features is so other people can find and make sense of your photos. Flickr gives you quite a few sharing options, but maybe the handiest is the embed option, which lets you paste thumbnail previews into forums, blogs, and social networking profiles such as MySpace.

Post Pics Directly to Flickr With Your Blackberry
Download the Flickr® Uploader for BlackBerry® smartphones to snap and share your photos.1,2,3 Delivering the same uploading and geotagging features as the desktop version, Flickr Uploader for BlackBerry smartphones is your instant, portable photo album.

Newbie’s Guide to Flickr

 

 

The New Website 2010

(Before Facebook, you know) circa 2003, websites were often attractive online brochures for companies to trumpet their goods and services to a target audience. I used to tell business owners that now their life would be so much easier because they could just refer incoming calls to their website for more info, etc. No more emailing, snail mailing, faxing spec sheets.

I used to also say to small business folks that the world was their oyster because their website could also reach a broader audience. The so-called “cold market”. Thanks to proper keywords, content and AdWords. No more cold calling and cut down on those Yellow Pages overpriced ads.

Well, none of the above has changed! Except websites. Right. This doesn’t make sense. But, it will. Read on.

Your standard, standalone static website is no more. It is now automatically dynamic, linked to and from Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and WordPress. It is a 48-hour THING pulsing and emitting stuff from and to everywhere, capturing the attention of humans you don’t know and never will, except for their phone calls, emails and credit cards.

Yes, your website can now earn money like never before.

Don’t look now. It’s gaining on you. Here are some surprising facts:

With 500 million users, Facebook has doubled in size since birth six years ago.

YouTube is the second-largest search engine … bigger than Yahoo and bigger than Bing.

There are over 25 million WordPress publishers. WordPress blogs are the instant free way to keep your website updated.

Twitter is electronic word of mouth advertising: for many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing!

LinkedIn has more than 60 million members geared to the professional business crowd.
(Credibility Enhancer: LinkedIn is the best way to link from your website to your resume/bio.)

Enter Smartphones:
Social networking is one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on the mobile Web. Today, 91% of Americans are mobile phone subscribers. Based on Nielsen’s estimate, 50% of these mobile subscribers will be smartphone users by 2011. What does that portend?

Okay, now you can look over your shoulder! What do you see? I hope it is not that raggedy old website of yours, oh so last century, or oh so last year. Last month?

Welcome The Ubiquitous Website.

Facebook Advertising for Local Small Business

Blogging and The Small Business Dream

What is the one thing you can do that will let you steal customers from right underneath the noses of the old dogs at the big companies?

Blogging, of course.

The End of the Road for Traditional Business Marketing
There are quite a few very successful businesses out there who no longer purchase print advertising: no newspaper or magazine ads. Not even a yellow pages ad in the phonebook. Good-bye, Phonebook

The first thing people now turn to is the Internet. In fact, 75% of people look to the Web first when searching for a service provider or business of any kind—including your business. And when we say “searching,” we mean it literally. People go to Google and search for what they want. Google is the new phonebook.

What about Pay-Per-Click?
It depends on your business, but in many cases, Internet advertising isn’t the solution to a steady stream of new customers. It’s something that helps after you’ve already established your long-term value on the Web. By itself, Internet advertising isn’t the answer.

Consider the most common service by which Internet advertising is done nowadays, Google AdWords. Google AdWords advertising is known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, because every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay for that click. You create ads and bid on keywords, which are search terms people type in Google’s search box. The highest bid gets the top display position on a search results page or in Google’s content network of sites that run AdSense advertising. The competition for many business-related keywords is fierce and expensive.

PPC Disadvantages: No Trust, No Permanence

Why Should I Be Blogging?

• A blog will enable you to deepen relationships with your fans. They find fresh, relevant content that is useful to them – and have a place where they feel heard. You need to encourage and enable your readers to engage in the conversation.
• Attract new visitors by demonstrating you are willing to provide them with information in a form and fashion they can understand and use. People using Google will find your business or firm a lot easier if you have a blog.
• Blogging is actually a perfect way for a new business or professional service firm to become a so called “expert” in their own niche.
• Your blog will be a tool to enhance and develop valuable partnerships with other businesses or firms. We can say from our own experience this is very true. We have all developed some great partnerships over the last couple of months alone because of our blogs.
• A blog is a great place to put testimonials from clients and customers.
• Learn more about your industry just by jumping in and starting a blog and using social media tools to grow your blog.
• Position yourself as a “thought leader” or “opinion shaper” in your niche, business area or industry.

Blogging is something that any business can do and it has long-range positive effects on client/customer acquisition and reputation. Unlike traditional advertising or PPC advertising, it’s affordable and effective. Thanks to web analytics, you can see exactly how effective it is. And let’s not forget to mention what you see when you look at your bottom line.

Blogging is an entirely new way for business or professional service firms to market themselves—one that works just as well for any business. Those who are blogging effectively already possess a decided advantage over those that do not. The proof is already all around you. Thousands of small business and professional services firms are blogging right now…

They’re raking in customers. They’re building trust and a reputation. And they’re doing it in this economy.

all business is local

If your business is an “offline” business with a physical storefront, the most effective way to improve your search rankings is to list your business in the free local business directories from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (and others.)

Once you are listed in these directories, you have a chance to get listed in the “Google 10-Pack” – which is an invaluable way to get the word out about your business when people type in search terms in your
local area.

This is a free process that only takes a few minutes, so it is definitely worth the time and effort. Before filling out your profiles, you’ll want to have a nice description of your business handy, and ideally a few photos.

Here are the links to the top three local business profiles
Google Local Business Center
Yahoo Local
Microsoft (Bing)

List your business in each of these directories, and provide a link to your website when you fill out the profiles.

Another great option for listing your business in the directories is UniversalBusinessListing.org.

This is a clever service that allows you to enter and maintain your business information in one place. It handles distributing your info to Google, Yahoo, Bing and about 7 other directory locations, including the online Yellow Pages.

DIY shopping carts

SHOPPING CARTS are defined by what you want to pay one-time for a developer or what you want to pay to create your own shopping cart via ongoing fees based on performance. Here is the latest entry in the FREE field.

ETSY
BUY AND SELL ALL THINGS HANDMADE

No HTML required. Customize your shop with a banner, profile, shop policies and more.When you join Etsy, you’re joining a community of helpful, knowledgeable sellers. You can chat with other Etsians, share tips and marketing strategies on an Etsy Team or even attend an online workshop in Virtual Labs.

Etsy shoppers are looking for handmade goods, vintage items and craft supplies. Sign up for free. To become a seller, you’ll need a credit card for verification purposes.

Cost:  20 cents to list an item for four months. When your item sells, pay a 3.5% transaction fee.

what designers can’t do

Unlike print media, digital media is not entirely controlled by the web designer. Another designer challenge you should know about.

On the web the designer has no control over several factors, including the size of the browser window, the web browser used, the input devices used (operating system, mouse, touch screen, voice command, text, teletype, cell phone, or other hand-held), and the size, design, and other characteristics of the fonts that users have available (installed) and enabled (preference) on their device.

Unique manufacture and conflicting device contentions are further complicated by varying browser interpretations of the same content, and some content automatically can trigger browser changes.

new year’s resolutions