We recently designed a site for Ocean Frontiers, a new environmental film about ocean stewardship. The site is built in WordPress, and includes: editable flash slideshows, random testimonials, and recent news items posting to the home page with thumbnail images. Check out the website at: ocean-frontiers.org

We were just recently interviewed by The Union for an article about mobile websites in Nevada County.

Read the article:  ”Businesses Going Mobile.”

Hope you all have a wonderful 3-day weekend!

Summary of today’s HubSpot.com webinar “How Marketers Succeed in a Social World”

Yesterday’s Brand Building

• Come up with creative.
• Hire and agency.
• Buy ads on TV and in print.
• Buy more advertising.
• Your brand comes out all perfect (and sterile).

Today’s Brand Building

• A brand is whatever people say it is.

What does that mean?

Today you need to grow your brand by cultivation, not control.

• Stop thinking like an advertiser.
• Start thinking like a publisher and socializer.
• Commit to the new inbound strategy (blogging, SEO, Free Tools, Social Media, and Opt-in Email Lists).
• Don’t dip your toe in the water.
• Jump in ALL THE WAY.

To learn more, watch the entire webinar How Marketers Succeed in a Social World at Hubspot.com, or view the slideshow. Or, view more presentations from HubSpot Internet Marketing

YES! Why?

1. Everyone is doing it

Many businesses are now setting up custom facebook pages with their message and brand, and setting this custom page as their landing page, so that when a visitor goes to their facebook url, they first go to the custom landing page, instead of the company’s wall.

2. It’s one more place to build your brand

Facebook is known for displaying all content on pages in a uniform fashion.  Unlike youtube.com where you can customize your channel with your own colors and backgrounds, facebook pages always have the same white background, black text, and blue headings.  You can’t change the style of the page, but you can add custom pages to your facebook page with your unique message and identity.

3. Facebook pages are becoming mini websites

The trend of setting up mini websites on facebook, is only going to continue.  It’s hard to ignore how many people use facebook now.  If you’re not sure how popular it is, check out The World is Obsessed With Facebook video.

4. It’s easy to get started

It doesn’t take long to add a few custom pages to facebook.

We recently set up a custom landing page for the Nevada City Chamber of Commerce that highlights the upcoming events in Nevada City.   http://www.facebook.com/nevadacitychamber note: if you are already a fan, you will be taken straight to the wall

In addition to a custom landing page, we also added an Email Sign Up tab to the Nevada City Chamber of Commerce’s  facebook page, so visitors can sign up to receive news from the Chamber’s blog, without having to go to the site to do that (making it far more likely they’ll sign up, than having to make a few more clicks to the website to get there).

Just watched another great webinar from HubSpot.com, called The Science of Timing. This one talked about the best times to publish blog posts, update your facebook status, and post tweets.   Here are some of the takeaways:

1. The Eastern timezone has the greatest population, with Central, then Pacific next.
2. Late in the day and week is the most retweetable
3. Weekends are best for Facebook sharing
4. Experiment with emailing on weekends.
5. Send email very early in the morning.
6. Your newest subscribers are your best.
7. Most people read blogs in the morning.
8. More men read blogs at night than women.
9. Blog on the weekends for comments.
10. Blog early in the morning for links.
11. Blog more frequently.

I just watched a great webinar on hubspot.com about The Science of Email Marketing.  There were a lot of great tips there, and many of them surprised me.  These are some of the takeaways:

1. Try sending emails on weekends.
2. Send very early in the morning.
3. 80% of users report reading email on mobile devices.
4. Use lots of links in your emails.
5. Give your subscribers special access.
6. Don’t be afraid to send too much email.
7. Ask people to follow you, not share your emails.

Definitely worth watching if you send email campaigns.

An easy way to publish an email newsletter is to use WordPress and Mailchimp. In a nutshell Mailchimp can pull the content from your blog post and send it via email as an e-newsletter (you can also post straight to facebook, but that will be the subject of a future post). Once you have a template setup, one of things you need to be careful about is how you insert an image into your blog post.

The video below gives a brief explanation on the best way to insert images so that they look good in both your blog and your newsletter.

Before starting any website, I always suggest going to Google’s keyword tool and looking at what keywords in your industry are most searched for in Google. For example, say you are a floral designer who primarily does weddings and special events.

Before you register a domain name, go to Google’s keyword tool, and search for keywords related to your business.

1. You’ll need to answer the security check first, by typing in the word you see in the box.
2. In the main screen, in the “word or phrase” box, enter a single keyword for your business.  In this case, “floral” and then click search.  Once you see the results, customize them by deselecting any categories in the left column that don’t apply to your business.  In this example, “delivery”, “flower delivery”, and “flowers online”.
3. Then, in the left column, select “exact” for the Match Types.  And, click on Global Monthly Searches to arrange the results in order of greatest to least searches.
4. What you have now is a great list of keyword ideas for your website.  Follow the same steps for other words related to your business, such as:  flowers, weddings, etc.

Now that you know what phrases have the most traffic, consider choosing a domain name that includes some of those phrases.  In this example, our floral designer, Ann, could choose the domain name:  annsfloraldesigns.com.

Once you get ready to build your website, go through the lists of keywords you’ve found, and highlight the ones that seem most appropriate for your business.  Then, give this list to your web designer, so they can set up your new website making conscious use of the keywords in your page names, headings, and titles (all very important in your google search rankings).

If you set up your website with a blog, you will also want to use this list of keywords when you write new blog posts.   Using keywords effectively in your blog, can definitely boost your rankings in Google.

Search is a huge part of any web design project, and discovering what keywords your customers might be using to find you, is a great place to start.

Lately Facebook.com has been all over the news (again) for the changes it’s made to the privacy settings on individual accounts.  Did you realize, that the default privacy settings on your individual Facebook account, aren’t actually very private?  That means that unless you have gone in and changed your settings, you are probably “over-sharing”.

There’s lots of talk on the web about people leaving Facebook over the privacy changes, but don’t kid yourself, Facebook isn’t going anywhere for now.  The reason Facebook is so popular is because it is changing the way information is shared on the web.  It’s competitors would love to see it back down right now.

Personally, I don’t care that Facebook shares a little information about me with other sites like TripAdvisor.com and Yelp.com.  I use these sites all the time, and this information allows those sites to offer me a more personalized experience, and I like that.

However, I don’t want all of my personal photos visible to the world, so I’ve changed my settings so that only “Friends” can view my photos (except of course my profile photo).

This is great tutorial from BusinessInsider.com that I went through: How To Put Facebook On A Privacy Lockdown