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This video has been making the rounds in our office of late. Thought you might enjoy this little teaser of the end of Western civilization as we know it.
You have to wonder if she studied communication under our current president.
I'm not sure what they smoke down in South Carolina, but it shouldn't be taken before operating heavy machinery.
The third time's a charm.
I'll be teaching Web Marketing for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses at the University of Southern Maine's Center for Continuing Education this fall. The classes will be Thursday evenings from 6pm - 8pm, September 20th - October 11th.
To crib from their site (which I think I wrote originally, anyway):
Your Web site is the hub of your marketing universe. In this four-class course, you will learn how to build an effective Web site that will attract qualified prospects and convert them into customers and clients. You will learn how to optimize your site for the search engines, utilize e-mail marketing, plan, build, and promote a business blog, and use other Web marketing techniques to attract clients to your business. Time will be spent each class reviewing Web sites and providing feedback on students' Web sites and Web practices.
The cost is $205, there's 8 contact hours (no touching--don't worry) and you can earn .8 CEUs. To learn more and register be sure to visit the Web Marketing course page at the USM site.
Can't make it? Be sure to check out the Web Marketing Seminars section of our Web site.
Rich Brooks
Web Marketer
The other day flyte launched a Web site for Theriault/Landmann Associates (TLA), an architecture and design services company located in Portland, Maine.
The site promotes their different architecture projects, including financial, healthcare, masonry and special projects.
Flyte also built a backend admin system for TLA so that they could add, edit or even remove projects as time goes on.
Rich Brooks
Maine Web Design
"Sucks" is an incredibly powerful word if you know how to use it. Why? It appears to be the favorite word of unhappy customers everywhere, which makes it your friend.
Let's say you are looking for a hosting company. You see one recommended on some Top 10 list somewhere but are concerned, because you don't know if XYZ Hosting actually hosts this top 10 list. So you go over to Google and type in
"XYZ Hosting" sucks
The page is filled with vitriolic diatribes in discussion forums and blogs across the Web. Scratch XYZ Hosting.
There are other, deeper ways to do due diligence, but nothing cuts to the chase like "sucks."
If you've been trying to figure out how to monitize your blog there's no more exhaustive, comprehensive place to start than Blogs as Stores: A Comprehensive Overview of Ecommerce Solutions for Bloggers over at TypePad Hacks.
Written by my friend and associate John T. Unger, it provides lots of ideas on how you can make money with your blog; everything from standalone stores to affiliate programs to hybrid solutions to hacks.
There's really nothing for me to add that's not on the post, so if you're looking to make money with you blog, check it out.
We have a special guest today at the flyte blog, flyte's own Carolyn Phillips.
Carolyn's been bursting at the seams, wanting to blog about search engine optimization, so here she goes! (Be gentle.)
Since I first arrived at flyte in late 2006, Rich and I have been discussing how to fit SEO services into flyte's portfolio. We've been happily and successfully working with Harvey Marketing for years, but found that our clients really wanted to work with us directly because of relationships and trust already built.
Rich and I both agreed that there are so many schools of thought and opinions regarding SEO that we wanted to develop a "Sustainable SEO" program that was not based on chasing search engine algorithms. We wanted to develop something more holistic that we could integrate with our process and incorporate all aspects of Internet Marketing, not just Search Engine marketing.
So Rich sent me to Search Marketing Bootcamp in Boston this past week. Wow, the speaker/trainer SEO Expert, Jennifer Laycock, confirmed all that Rich and I have been planning. And confirmed one very important philosophy: Optimizing your site content for Organic Search Engine visibility, managing a pay-per-click campaign, getting quality links to your site, and launching a social marketing campaign comprise a diversified approach to visibility is necessary for any business that is serious about competing on the web.
I am happy to announce that I already knew 85% of the huge amount of data that Jennifer transferred to our brains and hard-drives. But the 15% of "nuggets" I got will make all the difference in our ability to launch a customized "holistic" internet marketing campaign for our clients that will put you and keep you ahead of the curve.
As search engines are attempting to make more "human" judgements (Jennifer compared them to Pinnocchio who just wanted to be a real boy), and formulaic approaches to SEO are becoming outdated, the SEO process is actually becoming less intimidating from a technical standpoint. Internet marketing is now about great, fresh and abundant content (that is not packed with keywords but flows NATURALLY), building quality links based on business relationships and relevancy, following some manageable SEO best practices with regard to navigation, usability and metatagging, and joining an on-line community of likeminded folks.
If you have a great product or service, marketing on the web has never been more intuitive and approachable. On the flip side, it's still not EASY. It takes commitment of time and budget to crank out great content. Pay-per-click is still very complicated and labor intensive and should be approached with an eye to eventually weaning off it as you gain organic visibility.
Flyte is poised to help you navigate through the latest and greatest strategies available and even help you create some new ones.
See you soon!
Thanks, Carolyn. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Carolyn or me at flyte.
Carolyn Phillips & Rich Brooks
Sustainable Search Engine Marketing
While it's never too late to optimize your site for search engine visibility, the best time to do it is before you build it (or rebuild it.)
Why? For the same reason it's better to plan the electrical system before you build your house; it's less expensive to build the electrical system into the house rather than tear down walls to install the wiring.
At the most recent Search Engine Strategies seminar in San Jose, there was a session entitled Search Engine Friendly Design with a panel made up of Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive and Maine's own Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink.
The entire session has been documented and can be found at the SE Round Table Web site at Search Engine Friendly Design.
A couple of nights ago someone broke into our office (and the office across the hall) and stole a laptop computer. Since they left everything else and didn't ramsack our offices, we assume it was a quick smash-and-grab for drug money as opposed to corporate spying.
Originally I wasn't going to blog about this, but since the reprocussions will be with me for the next few weeks, I figured I'd share some of what I learn so that all small business owners can protect themselves, or, if it's too late, know what to do next.
The doors to our building lock at night automatically, but all anyone has to do is wait for someone to leave and grab the door before it closes. (We've all seen that a hundred times on Law & Order.) Or, they could come in during regular hours, wait in the rarely-used stairwell and come out once everyone's gone home for the night.
We also have locks on our office door, but not a deadbolt. I wish I had asked my landlord for deadbolts when we moved in, or just spent the money myself. That in itself probably would have convinced the burglar to move on. $50 or so bucks would have saved me a lot of headaches.
The burglar didn't take the hard drive with all of our backup material, which was good news. However, it made me realize how vulnerable we are to that. I'll begin to look for online, remote backup services asap.
State Farm, our insurance agency, was a pleasure to work with. Steve Trombley's our guy...if you're in the greater Portland (ME) area, give him a call at
(207) 799-3321. Minus the deductible we're getting a new computer that's actually a little better than the one that was stolen. Of course, I still lost time to ordering it, plus all the time to reinstall the software, etc. Ryan backed up his email database and other work before he left, but it will still be a pain to reinstall everything. Plus, you know there are things you didn't back up the way you should have.
Lessons Learned:
I'm sure there's more, but that's what I have right now. I'll post some helpful links as we continue our research into securing our office.
Often a client may pick up an extra domain or want to promote a new domain as their business focus has changed. There are negative search engine ramifications when you move domain names, but they can be overcome...over time.
However, it's a good idea to keep your old domain pointed to your Web site. That URL may still exist on the business card you gave someone last year, or there may be incoming links to it. The other day I went to what I thought was a client's Web site; I forgot that they were now promoting a new URL, but I didn't realize they had let the old one lapse. Here's what I found:
Yikes.
Not exactly what I'd want people to find when they came looking for me. For a few bucks a year they could have kept their old domain, helping old contacts find them again. That certainly would have paid for itself.
If you did want to shed a domain, you might even try selling it yourself, especially if it's broad enough for another business to take it over.
While there are a number of search widgets you can add to your TypePad blog, I still haven't found one that I like. Mostly, I don't enjoy the branding of the free options that are out there. Since Movable Type offers an unbranded search, I've never understood why they don't roll it out for TypePad. Search is standard on WordPress blogs.
Recently I started sniffing around Google Custom Search. I've never been happy with the Google search box that many TypePad bloggers throw on their site; I just don't like the interface, or the landing page.
With the new Google Custom Search, however, bloggers (or Web site owners, for that matter,) have a lot more control over how the content is displayed. You can also search just your blog, multiple blogs and/or Web sites, or the whole Web.
If you do search your blog, you can even create a search that automatically searches your blog and all sites listed in your blogroll automatically (which is pretty cool.)
Google now offers the Google Custom Search Business Edition. What's the difference? $100 a year. What do you get for that $100? The ability to hide the sponsored links which will lure visitors away from your Web site, more customization opportunities, especially if you're comfortable working in XML.
There's a nice video demonstration of the Custom Search Business Edition here.
Is it worth an extra $100/yr? At a little more than $8.33/mo, it probably won't break the bank, and the ability to run a hosted, customized search without ads should make it worth it for many small business owners and bloggers.
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