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.

As we work with many non-profits, we get asked this question quite regularly: “How can we receive donations online?”

After you have received your 501c3 status, these are the steps:

Step 1
Open a bank account
* Most any bank has electronic services available.

Step 2 
Open a Paypal merchant account

Step 3
Connect Paypal with your bank account
Here is PayPal’s very helpful FAQ

Step 4
Take the HTML code from Paypal, insert via HTML editor onto one your your website’s pages

- OR -

Step 4w

Create a Wufoo account.
Make the world’s easiest donation form.
Embed the code into your site follow instructions…

This is just one simple way of doing taking in donations online. We hope this helps, but feel free to post your questions in the comment section of this blog.

You heard me. Your business does not need a phone app in the apple or android app stores. More than likely.

Last week, a client of ours was super excited to tell me all about this new web app they are “creating”. By creating I mean they paid some phone app company a set up fee (usually $250 – 500) and $50 a month for. When I asked what the app would do, they rattled off all the amazing features. Features like a home page, news, about us, contact, directions, and product info. So I asked to clarify, that this is indeed an “app”, Yes, they proclaimed! It will be free in the apple and android app stores.

Here is my giant issue. Please hear me very clearly here.

If your app is no more than basic content found on your site, its a waste of time, money and your efforts.

Yes apps are all the rage. All the cool kids are talking about apps. Trust me, no one is going to be browsing the app store, and think to themselves, “sweet! a company I have never heard of has an app about their company / service / product, and its free!”. No, no one will think that.

Save your money, time and app lust. I have a fix for you. Build a site that is mobile friendly. We have a few ways of doing this. One is responsive. Take our site for example. Resize your browser window smaller. Bam! It re-organizes itself to fit the screen size. Navigations get touch friendly, fonts remain clear and readable. Another alternative is a seperate mobile site with the core info, that we have an auto detect script set up on. Basically if the visitor screen size is less than 640px wide, send them to the mobile site. Give them an option back to the main full site. Yes, you can still use a QR barcode to direct people to your mobile site. They can call you, map your location, and learn more all from the mobile web, with no need for an app.

You may have a need for an app. If your idea is functional, helps a user, provides them a beneficial resource for planning, searching, researching, or tracking something. Great, go for it! Verizon has a great app to track my minutes used on my iPhone.  Starbucks has a store locator, with info on menus, amenities, and wifi. E-trade has an app to search, research and watch over your trades. Catch my drift here?

Make it useful, keep it relevant, and make it a benefit to your users (not just you). Or dont do it at all.

So we all know I am a geek, and love all things apple. I still give a lot of respect to the others out there. When chatting about tablets, it’s hard NOT to talk about the ipad, but there are plenty of others. A few great android tablets and the HP & Blackberry are pretty solid competitors as well.

So I assumed that the iPad would lose some market share. But per comScore’s May 2011 report, the apple iPad is 97% of tablet web traffic. 97%!!!!! Thats great. I love my ipad, and i know i love surfing on it. But I was really shocked to see the numbers where they are.

So as we push forward with sites we develop, more and more are 100% iPad friendly. Of course we still want to make the others can play nice too, but for sure reaching 97% of the tablet web surfers is our goal.

Is your website tablet friendly? Anyone out there use a non ipad tablet?

Where do you stand where quality counts?

Oxford suits is the only company left in america today that still makes its suits by hand. Seriously by hand. No machines. Can you imagine the hours to sew a single suit?

Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlX9pcBOqT0

Quality, attention to detail, pride in your work. they all matter.

This morning I went to the high school track closest to where I live to put in some speed work as I train for my first marathon. I arrived very early only to find that the track was in complete lock down. Every gate closed, every opening shut, chained and padlocked. Not one soul running. It was frustrating and more so, it was very confusing… I began to ask myself questions like, “Why aren’t any of the school’s athletes out there? Why aren’t other area runners training? What is going on?” So I drove a few more miles down the road to check the next high school. The track was wide open, and sure enough it was packed. There were 50-100 student athletes getting in their before-school training. Area runners were doing speed work. The track was even humming along with a few house moms getting in some circuit training.

So who sets the tone for your desire and drive? Is it the security guard who unlocks the gates? Is it head of the athletic department? Is it the conditioning coach? Or is it the athlete who gets up early to train? You know the answer… each of them do, but the driven athlete will always find a way to train, just like the driven leader will over come obstacles to achieve his goals.

* It shouldn’t surprise you to know that the high school with the closed track was only has a few state titles in it’s history. However, the high school with the open track has many and is considered by some to be the premier academic AND athletic school in the entire state.

HTML5 is going to be the new norm here soon. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, dont worry about it too much. Its the background structure / protocol running web pages. Firefox, Safari, Opera & Google Chrome are all HTML5 ready on some level. IE 6, 7, 8 are not. Rumor is the IE 9 will be. But I’m not holding my breath.

One of the big new laws in html 5 is the way a website can interact with video. We can now use a more native video format, that streams better on browsers and mobile devices. YES ipad & iphone (and other mobiles) can use the new HTML5 video.

HTML5 video will eliminate the need for flash on most devices.

So lets create a smooth video splash page for a product or service promotion. We’ll start with a simple design, and then move onto the video part.

Design

Sticking with a simple design. We want to center our video, and give it a nice frame.

The Base Html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>

  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  <title>HTML5 Video Player</title>

  <!-- Include your video library of choice CSS & Javascript Resources in the head -->

</head>
<body>

          <div id="wrapper"><!-- wrapper to create a center column -->
               <h1>Video Demo</h1>
               <div id="video">

<!-- We'll insert our video here in a moment -->

               </div>
               <h2><a href="http://www.factor1studios.com">Enter site</a></h2>
          </div><!-- close out the wrapper -->

</body>
</html>

and our basic css:

body {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Sans-serif;
	background: url(bg_body.jpg) repeat-x #111;
	color: #ccc;}

#wrapper {
	width:680px;
	margin: 0 auto;
	padding: 20px;
	text-align: center;}

#video {
	width: 640px;
	height: 300px;
	}

a, a:visited {
	color: #22daff;}

a:hover {
	color: #d1d1d1;}

	h1 {text-shadow: 1px 2px 1px #111; color: #eee; font-size: 4em;}

</style>

Video conversion

Here is my biggest gripe against html5 video. Each browser has their own video type. Safari: mp4, Firefox, OGV, and Chrome: WebM. Kind of a pain to convert your video to 3 formats, but in general it is a better experience for the end user right? so we’ll suck it up and deal with it.

So whats the easiest way to convert to these file types? I have tried a few ways, and thus far has been Miro Video Converter. Works on both mac and PC. mirovideoconverter.com. And best of all, its free. I used this to convert all of my videos.

Video player options

Sure html5 can take the new video symantic tag. But it doesnt leave the most consistent user experience. Then what about those lowly IE users? we can’t ignore them. We may want to, but we can’t.

There are a handful of opensource javascript and css players. They players make it nice and easy to auto detect the browser type, and deliver the best video possible. Some even offer a flash drop out for the worst case IE users.

Some options include:
Video for everybody: http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
Video JS: http://videojs.com
Sublime: http://jilion.com/sublime/video
Projekktor: http://www.projekktor.com/

Each essentially adds a layer of functionality and style to the html5 video tag. I liked Video JS for this use.

Prepping you server for the video

This is a super important step. Not all servers will recognize the mime types of videos. Using a simple htaccess file, we can add these three simple lines to indicate the file mime types.

AddType video/ogg .ogv
AddType video/mp4 .mp4
AddType video/webm .webm

Pulling it together

1. Download the Video JS codes, and upload the files to your server.
2. Insert the necessary codes for the CSS and JS into your files head tag.
3. insert their player codes into your video div
4. Modify the file paths to your videos for each file type.
5. update the flash var source for the back up video, making sure you use a absolute full url.

Save and test!

Here is my final result, http://proofs.factor1studios.com/mediasalt/video/ with the videos playing in native formats for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, with IE dropping to a flash swf fall back.

So now you don’t have an excuse to not be producing great video splash pages or video on your site, with full support for all browsers, and mobile devises.

In almost every industry you will find a premium product, and several tiers of brands or services falling in rank there after. Their order doesn’t matter. What matters is the premium, and the non premium.

Here is what I like. Premium sets the bar, the gold standard, and the price. The market and industry of that premium product depends on these factors, for the smaller fish to survive.

But here is the catch. You can’t expect to compete with the big dogs, yet offer value on one of the key factors (quality, price, service, etc). An amazing car, but at sacrifice on service wont work. Ask the 1996 Car and Driver best luxury car of the year Mazda Millennia. Rated better than the lexus, mercedes and BMW in the class, but failed to deliver the customer service. And it did poor in sales. Mazda stunk at pampering its customers.

There are other similar stories I’m sure, but here is my point. If you cant compete on all levels, and win at the expectations placed on the premium, then dont. Find a way to better compete with the smaller fish.

Nothing wrong with being the biggest medium fish possible. Let the big fish pay for infrastructure, R&D, market research, and so on. You keep up, push the limits where you can, and focus on the ways you are different. There are a lot of cars sold in the middle to low range. Far more volume than the top cars.

Dont get me wrong, I’ll be the first to look at a new idea and ask if we can make money from it. Where are the expenses, and where is the profit. But I need to remind myself and others often, to have value first.

Try not to become a person of success but a person of value. ~Albert Einstein

Lets take a look at twitter’s newly announced plans of advertising in twitter for a great example. This week twitter announced how it will be selling ads within twitter. Its a pretty unique method. But lets step back for a second.

Twitter was free of ads, and free to users for a few years. They built up a customer base, and refined their systems. They kept it lean and mean by only offering one core service—updates. No photos, elaborate profiles, member pages, or other things that have hurt others in the past. Just updates, and a way to follow others. This added a large value to its base, and probably one key factor to its growth.

So back to present day. Twitter built value, and a customer base as its first goal, income streams came later. Did they always have plans for a revenue stream, I hope so! Sure it may have been a rough outline or a few sketchy ideas, but I am sure they did, and their investors saw it too.

Here are some simple questions to answer as you launch a new business, new product, service, or idea.

1. Who is my customer for this product & what is their need?
2. How will this address their needs?
3. Where is my competition on this new product?
4. Where can this under promise, and over deliver?
5. What is the opportunity for growth after we launch it?
6. Where do we see this product in 1, 2, and 5 years?
7. How are we going to make sure we keep up on the times
   (value now, with outdated needs in a year is no value!)
8. What if we fail to offer value now, can we innovate and change? or is the product dead?
9. How will we gauge & measure the value created?
   (It’s not always sales numbers, especially early on)

We at factor1 are always coming up with new things to help our clients. We clearly outline the goals, benefits, costs, target customer, and where the money is. We often will beta test and give out some freebies to make sure the value is where we expect it.

What tools do you use to measure your value?
Who do you turn to for advice on your new products, service, or ideas?

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

— Thomas Edison

Not everyone can come up with killer ideas, and execute. We are all different. Some people love the ideas, but fail to follow through. Others stink at being creative, but are great at getting it done. Weekly, we will share great ideas for marketing, business, creativity, strategy, and maybe some other random ideas that will help you in your organization. All you have to do is Just Add Hard Work