Why these reminders about your website content?
Because content is king!

We are having a lot of fun around here with a new project for one of our longtime client’s, Amy’s VIP Events, because it’s another opportunity to go deeper and help them receive maximum impact on their site, generating more new sales leads than before. A big step forward on this project will be SEO work focused through website content.

Here are 5 things that you need to know about your website content:

1. Words matter. There are 1,000′s of webpages not indexed properly with Google and worse yet, 23% of all websites are still coded in flash, making their website content not mobile compatible nor search friendly. Read it straight from apple.
2. Your words must be your own. You might be in a market with a lot of common phrases, definitions and terms, but the bulk of your website content needs to be original. Google knows plagiarism and just like in school, when you copy other people’s work it hurts you more than it helps.
3. Do Your Research. There is a lot of competition on the internet, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is stiff competition. Chances are very good that you might find a search rearm or two where there is a lot of opportunity because it they are being overlooked for more obvious terms that have many more competitors. Be sneaky and try related SEO terms where your website content can be a winner.
4. Stay focused and patient with your words. Believe it or not, everything on the internet isn’t instantaneous. Stay consistent on developing your content using your search terms. Keep writing, some results will come quickly while changes will slowly have impact. It can take up to three months for google to recognize all of your hard work and for your to properly dial things in.
5. You are never done. Write, write, re-write, watch your performance, adjust, continue on. Writing good copy is an ongoing process. Keep your site current. Never take down old stuff, but rather archive it or hide it, keeping it live but never gone. Google likes a lot of text and it helps the more pages that you have on the relevant topics you are trying to reach.

A piece of encouragement, writing good copy and content for your website is hard work, so don’t be frustrated if it takes you some time.
Over the next few weeks we will be sharing some of Amy’s SEO and ad placement results and also some (but not all) of our key processes. Amy’s VIP Events specializes in delivering custom Masters Tours and awesome pricing for daily Masters Badges.

We can make your site perform better too, so contact us!

You hear the crap all of the time. Why? Because you run the place. Every biting email, phone call or walk-in eventually makes it’s way to you. Yet, you can not be all things to all people. So please, do not try.

Specialize.

Remember what makes you great. Think back on the dreams that you had when you began. How were you going to be revolutionary, different, and possibly even extraordinary? That is what your business needs to be about. Make it special. Do remarkable things. But remember, you can not do it all, so you might possibly need to stop trying.

How can you do this?

Eliminate underperforming services. Can a marginally profitable product. Remove a feature of your company that takes up way more time than it should have a right to take.

Focus.

Zero in on your best ideas and your best opportunities. Find the items that will set you outside the normal expectations. Create beautiful work and services that others will pay a premium to receive or donate to if you are a nonprofit. Dream big. Execute daily. Ignore that complaints that you are not “all things to all people”.

You are free!

So avoid the trap of feeling like you need to be just like everyone else when it comes to your website, social media persona and your online marketing. You do not need to be a slave to formulas. You don’t have to have everyone “like you on Facebook”. Heck, it might not even make sense for you to tweet, and you definitely don’t have to be the flavor of the week on Pinterest.

America was built on rugged individualism, strong personalities and a fierce independence. These virtues work online too!

Happy 4th of July!

I want to create change, make money and work on stuff that matters. So do you. That is why you are dreaming, working, investing, planning, sweating, pushing, losing sleep and hopefully doing lots and lots of learning. Can you envision a future for your company or organization that is better than the one that you are experiencing right now? I hope so.

Business is a process. As a leader you know all too well that you can not wake up each morning and do exactly the same things that you did the day before. You must press harder into the profitable areas. You must let of things that take too much time without the requisite return or impact.

This thought process applies to your marketing and your online presence too. It can not be static. Do you know how your online presence is performing? Are you asking your users for feedback? Are you tracking your most clicked areas? Are you thinking through what your customers really NEED versus what you are putting in front of them? Do you have any idea how many potential customers are hitting your site via mobile devices as compared with desktops or laptops?

Ask 5 new people to go on your site and give you honest, real feedback. Ask them is they can find the information that they would want to find or hope to find. Ask them about their “experience”. See what they remember 24 hours later. Find out if they are impressed by your website or thought it was very unremarkable or even cheap.

Don’t be afraid.

Start asking!

Just a great example of a big, giant, corporate site, having some fun.

Lowes.com has a promotional banner highlighting their new paint calculator. The focus is partially on wasting less. So what better way to highlight that message than show some wasted paint. Dripping down the entire home page.

I applaud their creativity and ingenuity in pulling this off in such a classy way. Well executed!

Many of our sites run wordpress. We loooove wordpress around here. But a common question we hear, is where does the users profile photo come from? In comments, author biographies, etc.

Easy answer. 

We rely on the Gravatar system created by wordpress. Gravatar, or a “Globally Recognized Avatar” is an image connected to your email address, and is actually used on any site also using the gravatar service.

Huh?

Head over to gravatar.com, and sign up (free). Here you can connect as many emails as you have, and upload a photo. Now, when ever you administer a site, comment on a blog, etc, if you use one of those emails, it will auto pull your photo. Need to update the photo? great, log back in, and change it. It will globally update all your past articles, comments and profiles.

It’s a great way to give a face to a name, and humanize the internet.

Sometimes we get busy. Sometimes very busy. I can personally attest to this. I’m pretty sure most of March and April flew by me in a blink. Oh I know stuff happened. Projects, birthdays, trips, events, but it’s a blur.

Not sure about you, but when I get busy, I focus in. I skip social networks, networking events, follow up calls, little emails, etc. I’m all about the nose to the screen and get stuff out the door mode. Great from time to time, but if you hang out in this mode too often things suffer. New project leads, relationships, health, the weeds in my front yard, and even creativity. The busier I feel, the worse I sleep, the less Ii work out, the less I enjoy life. It’s a terrible cycle.

So take a moment out of your busy week. Say hi to some friends, thank some past clients, go exercise, spend some time with family, and enjoy life. If you work too hard, you may miss that life you are working so hard for.

P.S. Thanks to my awesome family and friends for putting up with me while I go crazy. We’ll get the life balance thing in order someday right?

We have all experienced the disconnect between what we see on the internet or in a advertisement and what we experience in real life. Who hasn’t drooled at the most amazing looking cheeseburger only to arrive at the restaurant and experience the worst, cold, slapped-together reheated piece of $#^! we’ve ever eaten? You and I have been disappointed and when the disconnect takes place, we are very likely to never return to that restaurant ever again.

So it should go without saying, your presence on the web is vital. Additionally, it is hyper-critical that what someone experiences, sees, reads and learns about via their browser actually lines up with the human touches of your organization.

So here are some simple pointers that you already know in your head or in your gut:

• Use pictures of real people. Real employees. Real Customers. Real Interaction. Do your best to avoid stock photography and staged, ‘high-school-senior-year-book’ images. (Yes, this might require you high a semi-professional photographer.)
• Convey actual quotes from your customers.
• Share true stories from the impact of your work.
• Remember, unless you are doing an incredible volume of online sales, we may need to talk to an intelligent person on the phone who speaks our native language.
• Cut the fluff and get to the point. Extra info is great, but highlight the most important aspects of what you do!

To make you (and I) a little smarter, take 10 min. to see the coming future of technology merging with the real world.

Strategies vary. So argue if you would like to with this article. What is for certain is that you need to have an online marketing strategy. If you are a non-profit, your strategy is just as important for you as it would be it you were leading a for-profit enterprise.

Here’s the baseline: In order for you to be successful, people need to be able to connect with the core story of what you do.

So, if you run an AC/cooling company, your core products, services, and company characteristics need to be readily and easily available online. If you head up an orphanage in Africa, the same is true for you as well. Give us pictures, insights, compelling, life-change connections to the children that you are caring for. Let us know how by connecting with you that ultimately we are getting the most impact for our dollars. This is an ultra-competitve marketplace. I can get my AC repaired by anyone. Your service, pricing and reputation must be ‘out there’ for us to evaluate. There are hundred’s of non-profit orphanages in Africa that are vying for our dollars. Your organization must be clear and compelling. It’s your story and you want and need us to connect with it

Story telling begins on your website. It’s is the center of your online universe. It is the hub of your wheel. It is what makes everything else goes around. To steal the analogy from this hotly circulated picture (below)… your website is your bakery. Use it to put out the product that you connect all of your social media and advertising portals back to. Central to everything you do is your web real-estate. Make it mobile friendly, simple to read, intuitive to navigate, and have a domain name / url that easy to remember. Keep your content fresh and current. Have purchases or donations be smooth as silk online. Connect, link, reference, promote everything back onto your website.

Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a deal breaker. – Seth Godin.

This statement is true in so many aspects. Look at politics, giant companies, churches, and non-profits. The more brilliant people in a room, the more no one can decide a single focus, direction and executable project.