Category: Build Visibility

Tip for creating links from your Pineterst site

I tell people to find me on Pinterest at http://pinterest.com/suecollyer/.

I pin a screenshot of the Virtual Assistant’s website who follows me there. (-: I make that work by having a special bulletin board for Virtual Assistant Community.  It does help my fellow VAs create a buzz and gives them a link to their site.. I think it sets an example of how to cross promote and how to be a generous marketer.

What are your thoughts?

Today is Autism Awareness Day. Autism is dear to my heart as I worked with Autistic children for ten years. It is important that we  raise awareness for this disorder.

Autism is a complex neurobiological disorder that typically lasts throughout a person’s lifetime. It is part of a group of disorders known as autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Please   be more tolerant in public of  parents of a child with autism.  What may seem to be a parent being unresponsive to a tantrum may be an important way to reinforce desired behaviors and ways to communicate.

Cnn news has an encouraging article – Victoria, British Columbia (CNN) — Joseph Sheppard.  Mr.Sheppard, 42, has high-functioning autism. He found out only about six years ago, but the diagnosis explained the odd patterns of behavior and speech that he’d struggled with throughout his life. And it gave him the impetus to reinvent himself as an autism advocate.

People with more severe forms of autism may not be able to live independently or hold complex, social jobs. But those considered high-functioning can have a wide range of careers; you may even have a classmate or coworker with high-functioning autism who isn’t as vocal about it as Mr. Sheppard, or who never got a diagnosis.

Being different is OK and having tolerance and love for those who handle life differently than we do makes us a better person and a more humane community.

What are your thoughts…

If you’re a small business owner, then the Pinterest statistics ought to grab your attention:      Just last week, Pinterest reached 11 Million monthly unique visits, 70% women, and 2 million Facebook users daily.. For many companies, it’s driving more referral traffic than Twitter and Google+. That growth is faster than any standalone site – ever.   Those are some impressive numbers if you’re looking to find a market for your goods.

Get the “Pin It” button for your blog AND bookmark bar. You want people to share your content, product photos and even book covers on Pinterest to drive incoming traffic. But you also want to have a “Pin It” button for yourself, so you can pin things you find interesting in a snap. Find them both here:  http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/

Here’s how it works: Users can set up “boards” to store all the images they find in their daily surfing. Cute puppies, home décor ideas, fun crafts for kids, and recipes are some favorites among the Pinterest devotees. When you pin an image, that image is linked to the original page you found it on, so others can check out that great new way to store wrapping paper, too. Those other users can also re-pin your image to their own boards, thus spreading the word far and wide.   I have a pinboard called “love Your boxer” sharing images of my favorite boxer dog and my images have been re-pinned.

This kind of viral sharing is – in large part – why companies are so interested in using Pinterest as a part of their marketing plan. And why you should be using it as well.

Share how can you  participate, and create value with your boards.

The Print Friendly & PDF button automatically creates printer friendly and PDF versions of your pages. There are other plugins that allow your visitor to print your content but they don’t allow you to brand that page with your domain name at the top and bottom of the printed document.With Print Friendly your document gets printed out as a super organized and branded PDF. How simple is that.

click on the image buttons and try it out.
When you click on the Print Friendly button a new window will open giving you 3 options:
1. Print(this blog post) as a PDF
2. Save to your computer as a PDF
3. Email the content to someone as a PDF
And that’s it. A simple way to make your content user-friendly and share-able.

To have the Printer Friendly plugin or any other plugins installed on your site, contact me today. I am waiting to help you.

Ever wondered what those funny looking square things are?

Why Should you use QR Codes to market your Business?

 

1. QR Codes are free.

You can generate a code here. Your call to action will be embedded in the code. Remember to let customer know the benefit of scanning the code. If you a re sending them to a website make sure the site is Mobile friendly (remember they are scanning with a mobile device)


2. QR Codes catch your Attention
They nearly jump off the page at you. QR Codes give instant results. They are literally in the palm of your hand

3. QR Codes drive traffic to your call to action.
They give your website quick and instant access..so much easier to scan a code with mobile device than type url into mobile browser.

4. QR Codes have Wow Power
You can establish your business credibility by being practical and on the cutting edge. QR Codes need to be part of your marketing plan.

5. QR Codes make Affiliate marketing easy
You can promote a product discount coupon code with QR Codes. Affiliate marketing can be brought offline- promote affiliate product discount codes in the newspaper,on signs,and even on T-shirts, business cards, mugs–only limited by your imagination.

QR Codes are the up and coming trend that closely coincides with the mobile technology evolution.

QR Codes are new, exciting and make for interesting conversation.They are the new sensation. QR Codes – Quick Response.

Your Mobile phone plus a free decoding software transform the data in the QR Code to a “call to action” which could include a website url, email address, coupon or url to an event you are hosting.

I just found Twitter’s Daily Newspaper.

Paper.li is a new site that’s allows you to create a daily online newspaper composed of Tweets that include links from either selected people you follow or list on Twitter or for a particular #hashtag search.

It’s free to use and can be setup in just a few minutes.

At your option, your daily page can be promoted via Tweets automatically and people can subscribe to get an email notification when your new issue is available.

Ultimately what you get is something along the lines of a magazine or newspaper that’s created just for you and is updated regularly. It has about 18 different categories to choose from to create a page just for your business or interests.

Since it can be difficult to follow all your favorite writers on Twitter itself or even using an app like Hootsuite, Paper.li seems like a great idea.

I am following Social Media Confidential by Bill Hibbler.His focus is on Social Media.

Let me know what you think about Paper.li. Will you set up your own page on  Paper.li?

WordPress is an easy to use, free platform to build your business. WordPress manages your site’s content, that is why it is called a content management system. 

 Here are some everyday reasons to use WordPress to increase your business visibility.

1. Flexibility – WordPress themes are flexible and can be customized to your personality, niche and products. Even better, you can change wordpress themes very quickly and easily. With a simple click of a button WordPress moves your content to the new theme for you.

2. Plugins For All Occassions – You can find plugins for just about anything you want to do with a website or blog. Popular plugins include contact forms, site statistics, search engine optimization, and photo resources. WordPress  also has a plugin to make your site vivible on smartphones.

3. Pagination – Back in the early days of blogging, blogs appeared as online diaries with one post following the next and comments intermixed between. With WordPress you can actually create pages to separate your material or to provide additional information. You can create additional pages such as ‘Contact Me’, or ‘About Me’ pages. This functionality also makes WordPress the perfect platform for businesses, not just bloggers!

4. Performance – Believe it or not, not every blogger is an expert at web design. Creating your own website or presence can be a daunting task for anyone. WordPress provides easy to use functionality with a built in dashboard to help manage your sight. Also, because of its popularity WordPress has many resources available to their users including online forums, help references, and support teams.

Want to save yourself the work and get your blogsite installed, created and customized so you can just get going?

Contact me…..I can help.

Did you know there was a MarketingProfs B2B  Forum held in Boston. The event brought together B2B marketers from all industries to share best practices and case studies. Most of the content at this year’s conference focused on online marketing, particularly social media. HubSpot highlighted 27 Marketing Lessons you should know.

Number 19 caught my eye:

20% of searches done in Google every day have never been done before.

I thought this is a great opportunity to create relevant content about your business even if people aren’t looking for it yet.

You can read these 27 lessons at Hubspot

Blog Design Tips
I often get questions regarding Blog Design. It has been noticed that some very ugly sites generate massive traffic flow. Why? Because Content is King. Google doesn’t look at your design. And many visitors will often read your content from their favorite RSS reader so they don’t even see your Blog Design.

So really, how important is Blog Design for your business?

Does it affect your traffic? Does it affect your subscriber base? Does anyone care?

In short – Yes!

Here’s a few observations I have made while surfing the web checking out Business Blog Design

I should also mention that I’m not even talking about things like floating angels, snowflakes that follow my cursor or background colors that automatically change every 30 seconds thanks to the wonders of javascript (for these sites I’ll stay around only long enough to laugh for a bit, then surf elsewhere). The following is a reference for bloggers who are actually trying to succeed online but may be using their blogs default template or a poorly designed alternative.

1. The search engines don’t care if your site looks any good, but I do as a protentianal customer and you’re writing for me not Google. If you’re not writing for me then I’m not coming back anyway.

2. It’s about perceived value. If I hit your site and see you’ve clearly put 0 effort into your design, I’ll automatically question how much time you’ve put into your message. I may still read your post depending on how I arrived, but I’ll be reading with a filter that didn’t need to be there in the first place.

3. There’s no shortage of competition out there. So unless you happen to be the # 1 voice in your industry and provide indispensable information with every post, which is unlikely, give me a reason to stay, not a reason to leave.

4. If you break new design ground you may generate a temporary buzz but if you have nothing to say your creative wonder of a blog isn’t going to convince me to come back a second time.

5. If your site uses yellow, red, pink or other light font colors I can’t read it… I’m partially color-blind and you just lost me.

6. Your job as a blogger is to keep people coming back to the SITE. You can’t have a conversation if your readers stay at arms length so give them a friendly place to come back to!

7. There’s something to be said for image. You don’t go to a dentist with discolored, cracked teeth or a chiropractor who sports a cane and you generally wouldn’t buy from a sales man dressed in a speedo! People are coming to your blog with certain expectations, understanding those expectations and exceeding them is better than the alternative.

8. Don’t design for your tastes (unless you’re an historically proven trendsetter). Let me put that another way: I don’t care that you really like yellow and black; the colors of wasps, bees and danger signs don’t belong in large quantities on your blog template!

9. This won’t apply to all blogs, but I read a large sampling of business related blogs and this one is for those bloggers. If your blog template NEVER changes, you obviously aren’t trying new things or testing the results and I’m going to question your online business savvy.

10. Having a great looking blog doesn’t mean you need to break the bank hiring a designer. A blog platform like WordPress offers free templates that can be customized to suite your Company Brand.

A lack of a unique and trendy Blog design shouldn’t hold you back from starting a blog. At the end of the day, it’s your message that brings people in, not your design (unless you are a blog about design). That being said, a sleek design should be at the top of your ‘To Do’ list once you get the ball rolling!

A blog’s template should always serve to Enhance the presentation of your content and never overshadow it, and what’s really important in a Blog template is speed, accessibility and clarity.
My preference for wordpress templates is StudioPress.    StudioPress makes WordPress templates that are functional and stylish.

Do you have any great tips that I haven’t covered here? Or do you disagree with any of my advice? Let me know by leaving a comment!