2013
How video and email marketing can drive more traffic to your website
source: www.startupsmart.com.au
Cindy Cornett Seigle via Compfight.
.
.
Shareable video blog
Video is king. If you can record a two to three-minute video every few days and post that on your blog and YouTube page (tagged correctly, of course), you’ll start driving people who match your typical customer profile directly to your blog.
Keep it simple and inexpensive. Set up a blog on a free platform like WordPress where you will embed your videos as blog posts after uploading them to YouTube.
Email marketing
Start a weekly or monthly newsletter with useful content that contains a limited number of product promos only.
Your newsletters should educate your subscribers, not give them the hard sell.
Repurpose the videos you’ve been recording for your blog and include them in the newsletter (use screenshots of videos in newsletter — unfortunately, you can’t embed videos in email).
Make sure you link the screenshots to your blog posts, NOT the videos on YouTube. You want to drive traffic to your website.
Place buttons at the top and bottom of your newsletters that encourage subscribers to follow you on Twitter and Facebook.
And at the end of each issue, include a coupon code — or better still, a product that you can afford to heavily discount.
You want people to look forward to receiving your newsletter, and a good deal can be a great motivator.
Make sure your newsletter has a share button (MailChimp is free and has one). You want as many people as possible to see your information.
Now, why are you going through all this effort?
The goal of your guerrilla marketing is to get your profit up to a few thousand dollars a month, so you can invest in a search engine optimisation consultant and a Google AdWords expert.
This might take a few weeks or months, depending on your guerrilla marketing tactics, profit margins, etc. But it’s worth it.
A good SEO consultant should be able to get you ranking at the top of Google/Yahoo/Bing for at least a few keywords.
The process could take as little as four months and may cost anywhere from $300 to $3000 per month depending on the scope of your effort. But be smart.
Make sure you check references and actually see with your own eyes that their past clients are ranking high and call their clients up for feedback.
While your SEO consultant is working, run a trial Google AdWords campaign yourself for some of your popular products (around $100/day) and see if you can make it profitable. (For more insight, read Perry Marshall’s eBook for Google AdWords strategies.)
When you can afford it, also bring on a Google AdWords consultant. He or she will charge from $100 to $2000 or more per week, depending on hours worked, number of keywords you’re advertising for, number of ads, and other factors.
The goal is to have two experts handling your most critical traffic-driving activities: SEO and SEM.
When this happens, your critical traffic-driving activities are on auto-pilot, maintained by experts so you can focus on serving your customers and turning them into raving, lunatic fans.
Another option is investing in an online software-as-a-service like HubSpot. This service optimises your blog and social media accounts and gets your content recognised by search engines for $200 to $1000 a month.
2013
How 123reg Almost Crippled My Business! from Ben Hunt
www.webdesignfromscratch.com
There was actually nothing I could do to prevent this severe downtime. It wasn’t an issue with hosting, or DNS…
I could have fixed that.
No, the problem was that my domain registration company, 123reg, lost my domain name and failed to get it back for more than two weeks.
Here’s a screenshot of my 123-reg control panel, showing my domain as having renewed for another 3 years.
Ben wrote an e-mail — please read this :
2013
Why Hotels Should Have a Responsive Website
Photo Credit: Steve Bridger via Compfight
source: www.hermesthemes.com
“If you run a hotel/motel/inn/b & b these days, you no doubt either have a website or would like to have a website. In this digital age, it is an essential part of your business to have a website where people can get more information about your offerings. Without a website, you could be losing out on a very large chunk of potential customers.
But, I’m not going to talk about the merits of having a website today. Today I want to talk about responsive web design, or “mobile ready” web design if you will.
Let’s just assume you already have a website or are serious about getting one. A very important thing you must consider is how your website is presented on a mobile device (e.g., smartphone, tablet).
These days we do almost everything with our mobile devices, from checking our bank statement to finding a good restaurant for dinner.
Recent studies have shown that a large amount of travelers these days plan, book, and track their travels abroad on the internet, and mobile devices have made this so much easier. With just a couple taps you can setup a flight, rent a car, and even book a hotel room.
Embracing mobile travelers with a responsive website design can make a huge difference for your business.”
“Responsive web design is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).”
“Without a responsive design most current mobile devices will simply either shrink a full-page design to fit within its screen boundaries, or zoom in on a specific part of the page. This is not very desirable from a usability standpoint.
Responsive web design helps developers prioritize certain parts of the website for different visitors.
Why is Responsive Design Good?
Let’s go over just a couple of the reasons why having a responsive website is so important for hotels:
- Responsive Design Can Make You Look More Professional and Help You Stand Out from the Crowd. People really like things that “just work“, and a website being displayed on a mobile device is no exception.A website that does not have a mobile-ready design can actually turn some potential customers away. Having to zoom and scroll around a site in order to see everything in its entirety is bad for usability and looks somewhat outdated.
A website that has been designed with mobile devices in mind will make you stand out from the crowd in a very big way.
- Responsive Design is a Good Business Decision.
People viewing your website from a mobile device will not appreciate being forced to switch to a desktop or laptop computer in order to access all of the features of your website. It’s unintuitive and can waste a lot of time.Many people will actually pass up your offerings in such a case. If they leave your site, you lose some potential business.
Without a responsive design, it will seem as though you are ignoring mobile users. This is not a good message to be sending to potential customers.
- Can Save You Time & Money. One alternative to responsive design is having a “mobile version” of your website. However, this can cost you more time and money in the long run.Mobile versions are generally designed for specific screen sizes, rather than being scalable, and can get quite complex.
Responsive design is considered to be a better practice as you are serving one scalable version of the website to all size screens. This saves you from having to maintain different versions of the website and can even help save you money depending on your setup.
- Future-Proof Your Website. You can also help future-proof your website by implementing a responsive design. With the convenience of mobile devices, many people will likely be moving to mobile-only setups going into the future (i.e. no desktop, no laptop).Having a mobile-ready website will help your business stay relevant in the ever-changing personal computing landscape.
So with all that in mind, can you really afford to not have a responsive website? Probably not.
But, but… How!?
Now it is understandable that not everyone is experienced in these matters, and you might have no idea how you would go about implementing a responsive design, so it’s good to have an experienced partner on your side that can help you.
This is why you should consider using a WordPress theme by HermesThemes, which are all completely responsive.”
end of the citation
If you need help to create a responsive website, please don’t hesitate to contact me:
phone: +49 (0) 377 57 184 780 or by e-mail: elke@simple4u.info
2013
… made a new website
.. using the open source software by wordpress.org and a theme from presscoders.com
please visit: www.thienktb.com
Mr. Gerhard Thien and his team created a new vacuum cleaner system:
The vacuum cleaner with no exhaust air.
We invented a new vacuum cleaner system – innovative and good for the environment,
easy to use and produceable at low cost. This idea will revolutionise the market.
2013
Infographic: How Mobile is Changing Business
++ Click Image to Enlarge ++
Source: How Mobile is Changing Business – Infographic
2013
“Outsider” — The Flame
There is a deeper background behind the text: The lyrics were written before the wall came down in East-Germany 1989. Many people got big problems with the GDR secret service only because they were different and said their thoughts in public. Michael Kohler and Frank Flemming have written these lyrics and all of us should never forget how to live under oppressive regimes.
2013
The Flame — nice songs !
Cover Album Outsider
Album Outsider — here are some clips
all songs shortened — you can get it on iTunes and Amazon
Link website The Flame: www.flame-vox.com
2013
My new project Jan. 2013
A new year — a new project !
Hello and welcome back, my Dear friends,
Frank, a friend of mine, started 3 years ago creating his own music, after playing in different bands, actually we spent our teenage time together and I traveled a lot around with him and his band — long, long time ago, … ha, ha .. getting old.
Anyway, now, Frank will release his fourth album in Spring 2013. The music is done, all is in the “box”, we are waiting only for the CD cover design and print.
The fourth album “Bosporus” includes more oriental influence — I’m really excited.
So, anyway, I started creating his new website in English, which is still under construction. Mark (Bayliss Graphics) helped me a lot with the translation from German to English ‚… and he is still doing it. Thanks Mark !
But we have to do a lot more: social network (Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, etc. …), Mark startet the production of some videos for YouTube and as I said, the cover design of the new album is on the way, I’m creating the first concept of the PR, not easy for me, .… if somebody would like to get involved please write me an e-mail.
Please have a first look at the new website:
Thanks a lot to everybody !
Best wishes from Elke
2012
Season greetings
To all my visitors and friends:
MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR !
I wish you a wonderful time and good luck in 2013!
Photo Credit: zenera via Compfight
Latest Tweets
twitter
Recent Posts
- The Science of Productivity
- Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit
- How video and email marketing can drive more traffic to your website
- 10 Lessons on Marketing
- How 123reg Almost Crippled My Business! from Ben Hunt
Categories
Tags
Recent Comments
- Elke on The Flame — nice songs !
wp
- Customizing Comet: Beau and Arrow EventsWho doesn’t love “Before and After” home improvement shots? It’s always amazing to see how just a couple of changes, like a coat of paint or a quick do-it-yourself project, can transform a living space dramatically. It’s no different when it comes to WordPress.com blog themes, in which a little customization can go a long […] […]
- Freshly Pressed: Friday FavesAn ode to a father, a story of growing up with two mothers, a request for a cloak of visibility, and a reflection on goodbyes. Here are four Freshly Pressed standouts from this week — all quite personal pieces that have resonated with many readers. Go ahead and dive in: Why I Don’t Diet — […] […]
- New Theme: SnapHappy Theme Thursday! Sharing and managing your work online should be easy, and today I’m thrilled to announce a new theme from our friends at The Theme Foundry that helps you do just that! Snap is a responsive, lightweight, and minimalist theme that makes it easy to feature your projects. Snap’s clean grid based blog […] […]