Posted by marlene on August 3, 2009 under Just a Thought | 
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Seeds take time to germinate. While you are waiting to harvest sales from your prospecting efforts, make sure you don’t forget to service existing customers. Reinforce your relationship with loyal customers. By keeping in close contact, you keep your capabilities current with client needs and learn about new opportunities first.
Posted by marlene on July 30, 2009 under Just a Thought | Be the First to Comment
In this market, companies are cutting costs — especially in their marketing campaigns. Print marketing is a great strategy to stay healthy and competitive. Create the perception of stability in unstable times and gain a competitive advantage. Print campaigns are good to use during a recession as there is less junk mail in mailboxes. It’s a perfect time to develop and maintain a database of customers and prospects. Contact them on a regular basis. Mailings of postcards, newsletters, sales brochures and letters will keep your company’s name in their minds to help expand your marketshare of business.
Posted by marlene on July 21, 2009 under Technical Talk | Be the First to Comment
We sometimes get questions about webgraders and their outcomes. Why do certain sites score higher than others? Aside from some basic onsite code issues such as 301 redirects, image alt tags and site metadata, webgraders evaluate sites on a number of other criteria such as:
• URL birthdate – older URLs are given more credibility
• Expiration date of a URL – sites with an expiration of more than a year are more favorable
• Inbound links
• Outbound links
• Directory listings in DMOZ, Yahoo and Zoom Info
• Bookmarking site links and other social site connectivity
• Blogs
• XML output
It is important to actively market your site and create monthly todos to ensure you can grow your overall site score. Just because you build it, doesn’t mean instant traffic to your site. Newer URLss, in particular, need to work extra hard to achieve visibility in this Web-centric world.
Please feel free to call or email us to find out how we can assist you with enhancing your onsite code or social visibility.
Posted by marlene on July 10, 2009 under Just a Thought | Be the First to Comment
Getting your small business in a competitive market means you will need to invest in successful marketing, and with the technological advances of video marketing on the Internet, your business can reach a wider audience.
Video marketing can ensure that your business is getting more coverage and more information out to your future clients. Videos can increase your ranking on search engines, which means more people are viewing your web site and your marketing videos.
Advertising and marketing through conventional means can get expensive and advertisement search engines do not always grab the attention of customers. Including videos on your website does not mean you have to be an award-winning director or cost a lot of money.
Check out our series of small business education videos at http://www.youtube.com/piratewebswagger.com –we produced the series in-house (recording the voices of our staff and creating our puppet stars.)
Small businesses can create a showcase their business services and plans to customers. A video means that your future clients can have tangible evidence to the actual services, producing more trust and confidence in your business.
With so many web sites utilizing the video craze sweeping the Internet, it seems like a no-brainer that your advertising plan include video too!
Posted by marlene on June 29, 2009 under Technical Talk | Be the First to Comment
Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal entry or on-line essay that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site—in this case, WebSwagger. Why is blogging so popular? Here’s a jaw-dropping statistic that we want to share with you. Last year there were 173 Million blogs. This year there are 2.3 Billion blogs. That is an absolutely explosive growth in blogging! But here are some more compelling statistics …2 new blogs are created every second, and there are 33,000 new posts every hour.
Why are blogs so important for your small business? Blogging gets the buzz going. It helps you target audiences that you might not be able to reach through conventional marketing. The key to Internet marketing is making your business’s presence known across a multitude of Web sites.
Here are some tips we recommend on how to utilize blogging to market your small business:
- Add new blog posts to your website three to five times per week to keep people coming back.
- Create hyperlinks to your blog on other sites’ discussion forums.
- Join a network of like-minded individuals on sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn. The reward: Strangers may start recommending your thoughts and your Web site to others.
We hope you find these tips helpful. Happy Blogging!
Posted by marlene on June 20, 2009 under Technical Talk | Read the First Comment
If you want to receive information through your Website, you might want to consider a functional form that gets delivered to an e-mail—right from your Website.
You’ll need to convert a Word document into an interactive form. Everyone has Word, right? Well, not exactly. While it is a popular word processor, not everyone will have this software installed on their computer.
This is where Adobe Portable Document Format, or PDF for short, comes in. The only software required to open and use these files is the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Most Online users already have Acrobat Reader already installed.
Next, create the interactive PDF form. Once complete, it’s ready to be linked for download, attached to e-mails, saved to disk, and printed. A convenient print and e-mail button can be inserted into the form–a nifty little timesaver. Applicants can fill out and return the form with all the information intact using the free Acrobat Reader.
Here at WebSwagger, we always have the solution to help your small business. We just used this technique for a client who had a five page questionnaire we converted into a functional PDF form that gets automatically delivered to their e-mail. It was cost efficient to do and is working just great for them!
Posted by marlene on May 12, 2009 under Technical Talk | Be the First to Comment
Google measures a website and grades its importance on values from 0 to 10 — 10 being the most relevant. There are several ranking factors that determine your site’s page rank including page HTML text, inbound links, how long a domain has been around, site meta data, among others. The search engines analyze each page and grade it according to these factors. It is important to make sure you continually look to improve these as the weight of importance search engines place on these ranking factors change often.
Posted by marlene on April 27, 2009 under Technical Talk | Be the First to Comment
When search engines like Google or Yahoo! send their spiders out scouring the Internet to find sites to recommend to users, they use both the tags and content on your site to rank you. Your site tags are the background information in your code including title, headline, body, alt and meta tags.
To help your ranking, be sure your tags use the same phrases as are found in the content on each corresponding web page. If the search engine spiders see the same keywords and phrases in both places, it can improve your ranking.
So when you or your web developer is writing for your site, keep this in mind. Start by identifying and highlighting key words and phrases and then build your content and tags around it. You’ll be sure to have them in both places and the search engine spiders will be happy to crawl your site.
Posted by marlene on April 15, 2009 under Just a Thought | Be the First to Comment
Thanks, Tracey for sending us a chuckle: A buccaneer walks into a night club establishment with a paper towel on his head. The buccaneer says, “What’s with the paper towel?” The buccaneer says, “Arrr! I’ve got a Bounty on me head!”
Posted by Nancy on April 2, 2009 under Just a Thought | Be the First to Comment
I just returned from a follow up appointment at my dentist, whom I’ve only known for a few weeks. As I drove back home, I was thinking to myself, I’m really happy I found her practice.
Anyone who knows me can tell you I have dental-phobia. (I haven’t needed to take the valium a previous dentist prescribed for me to take
before each visit to calm me down.) So, I was trying to figure out why I felt so comfortable and didn’t need a day and a half of “recovery time.” I realized it was because from the moment I walked in two weeks ago in pain to today at a simple follow up they treated me like a friend, like a part of a family – not just another patient.
Of course that got me thinking about our clients and, how they feel after speaking or leaving a meeting with us?
Honey catches flies … and keeps them happy! I’ll be sure to put my jar out on the front desk.