Know Your Competition

July 23rd, 2010

by Debra Howard

 

Recently I was working with a consulting client and asked, “Who is your biggest competitor?”  He responded smugly, “I don’t have any.”

 

Unfortunately, this line of thinking is dangerous; especially in tough economic times.   Not knowing what the competition is doing, whether good or bad, can cost customers and missed opportunities.

 

Observations based solely on assumptions can lead to poor business decisions and missed opportunities to increase market share.  Honest assessment is key; you have to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.  If you are a customer and you need a widget, what are the benefits from buying the widget from your company?  Price?  Service?   Selection?  Brand?  Convenience?  Reputation?

 

Too many businesses assume that if they lower prices, customers will come.  Not true.  Businesses rarely survive on price alone.  Look at Inn n’ Out Burgers; McDonald’s is cheaper, yet there are always long lines at Inn n’ Out.  Why?  Because they do one thing and they do it extremely well.  They are also consistent.  Always friendly, always fresh; they consistently deliver what the customer expects.

 

My best advice—view your business through the eyes of your customer.   Visit your competition and visit your own store or business with fresh eyes.  What do you see?  What are others doing or offering that you are not?  What are you offering that no one else does?  Perhaps you have neglected to advertise the fact that you have extended hours two nights a week or guarantee every purchase with a 30-day money-back guarantee.  So many businesses overlook the positive characteristics of their own businesses simply because they assume everyone knows what they offer.  No one is a mind reader; you have to tell them and keep telling them every chance you get. 

 

So size up the competition even if you think they are no threat to your own business.  Information is power and survival of the fittest can mean knowing what everyone else is doing so you can improve on those services or add something no one else is offering.  Just make sure you tell the world with press releases, advertisements, commercials, on your website, emails, social media, and so forth.  Adopt big business marketing practices on a limited budget and you will attract new customers.  And who among us doesn’t want new customers?

Posted in Business, Marketing, Tips | No Comments »

Help! I Can’t Afford to Advertise!

July 10th, 2010

by Debra Howard

 

Sales have declined in the last couple of years and you’ve been forced to cut back on everything: employees, vacations, equipment for the business and so forth.  You are running a small business and cash flow is extremely limited.    How can you justify placing an ad when you are worried about making payroll?  You need more customers but what can you do?

 

Begin with Existing Customers.

To start with, take advantage of existing customers.  Hopefully, you have built a mailing list or email list of clients and can start with some direct mail advertising.   If you have neglected to collect this information, start NOW!    Offering current customers an incentive to buy from you or encouraging them to refer your business to someone else is an inexpensive way to jog their memory about your business and what you offer.

 

Depending on your business, email or direct mail advertising can offer two incentives for the price of one.  For example, if you are running a special sale, offer a coupon for the sale and if they buy, reward them with another coupon for the following month.  It is also a great way to track your ROI from your marketing efforts.  

 

Getting the Most from Your Website.

Don’t neglect your website when you are offering a sale or doing something newsworthy.  If you haven’t updated your site in more than a year, it is definitely time to add new content and images.  Tell your potential customers about any new products or features you are offering as well as adding a “What’s New” or “Company Buzz” page if you don’t already have one.  Adding informative articles about your particular industry or products helps customers stay abreast of the latest innovations and also reinforces your professionalism.

 

Adding a blog is another great way to interact with customers and offer up last minute sales and announcements without contacting your webmaster.  Just make sure that you include your website address on EVERYTHING: invoices, business cards, outdoor signs (if applicable), advertisements, letterhead, newsletters, brochures, and so forth. 

 

Additional tips.

Tying your marketing efforts with a local charity is another great way to encourage customers to buy as well as generating some goodwill for your business. For a limited time, donate a percentage of sales to your favorite charity.  Make sure to get the word out to the media for additional exposure.  If you have a company newsletter, do a feature story on the organization and why it is a worthwhile cause.

 

Offering free workshops or seminars is yet another inexpensive tactic to encourage customers to patronize your business and set you apart as an expert in your industry.  Volunteer to be a speaker at business networking clubs and go armed with inexpensive promotional marketing gadgets to distribute such as pens, magnets, notepads, and so forth.  Brainstorm with employees for additional inexpensive or no-cost marketing ideas that will generate a little buzz and some new business.   Having a limited advertising budget can be a plus because it forces you to get creative.  After all, what do you have to lose?  You may just stumble on to a low-cost, winning method for attracting new customers!

 

We invite you to share some of your marketing tips that have proven successful for your business.  What guerilla marketing technique have you used that has delivered the best ROI?

 

 

 

 

Posted in Business, Marketing, Tips | 2 Comments »

SEO Strategy and Google’s “Caffeine”

July 8th, 2010

 by Debra Howard

The latest SEO buzz around the Internet is all about Google’s new “Caffeine.”  For those of you that may not yet be familiar with Caffeine, it is Google’s latest indexing feature.  Because Caffeine just recently launched, there is much speculation around the Web and little hard evidence for the full effects of this new system. (For a detailed explanation about Caffeine from Google: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html )

So how will Caffeine affect your website? 

According to various articles and blog posts, the emphasis is being placed on real-time, news sites, and continual updates.  Website Magazine ran several articles in the August 2010 edition regarding SEO and indicated that content managers will have to step up their game and add fresh content more frequently.  Dave Cosper, Search Engine Guide, had a similar conclusion in his article “New SEO Practices for a Google Caffeine World.”  Cosper also indicated that Caffeine would focus more on organic results and quality content.

At this point, it is too early in the game to say definitively how Google’s Caffeine will affect your particular site.  However, the old rules of quality content, white- hat SEO tactics, and continual content and image updates are more important now than before.  Users are demanding quality information and expect to access it quickly, so if you’re lucky enough to have Google’s Caffeine select your site among the top ten, don’t disappoint your visitors.  Keep your site fresh and keep writing quality content.  If you’re lousy at writing, hire someone, find a journalism student, or someone that is good at writing and hire them!  Content is still king.

If anyone is experiencing recent changes in page ranking and suspect it may be from Google’s new system, we want to hear from you.  We invite you to share your experiences, both good and bad, by posting a comment.

Posted in Business, SEO, Search Engines, Tips | 1 Comment »

Sitemap generators

March 19th, 2009

Every Once in a while a client and/or friend ask me to take a quick look at their site.  When I get around to it I head over to their site and look around.  But the first thing I want to do is look at a sitemap of their site to see how many pages they have. It is usually the case that they don’t have a sitemap on their site so instead of me clicking on each page and following links around which can get pretty cumbersome I use some freely available tools. This tool with a single click gives me the information I am looking for. Mainly the numbers of pages on their site and the url.   Here is one such tool that quickly lets  you see a list of all the pages of a website.

http://www.akamarketing.com/html-sitemap-maker/

Enjoy! :)

Posted in Free Tools, Tips | No Comments »

Affordable website design

March 18th, 2009

smallAt an Internet Marketing conference the other day the spokesman continually referred to certain websites as Jimmy’s websites. Let me explain. He said there is always a teenager in every town or neighborhood that can make you a website for cheap or for free.  And that pretty much is true.  If you are just making a website for personal or family reasons and you don’t want visitors aside from your own friends and/or family then Jimmy can make you a website that suits your needs. It will certainly be an affordable website. But if you want much more visitors then you have to consider other alternatives.  And since this post is about affordable website design I will show how to get the best website for your money.

If you want a personal website for free; by personal I mean a website where you can put personal information or family information and don’t care about traffic and don’t want Jimmy to do it for you and you don’t really care about the looks or design of it then you can create a free account at the many free website places out there.   Here are some websites that will allow you to have something up fast.   They will give you your down domain like www.mysite.blogger.com or www.mysite.wordpress.com.  And they both have tutorials to help you get started fast.  If you want more flexibility both of this sites will allow you to customize many things you will just need how to do things.   And both allow you to use your own domain name if you choose to buy one.

  1. https://www.blogger.com/start
  2. http://wordpress.com/

COST: Free !
TIME: 1-3 hours to get everything going !
Learning Curve: Easy to Medium

If you want an affordable website for your business but you don’t care about traffic.   Then you ca get a domain name from about $5.00 - $20.0 a year and get a hosting plan for about $5.00- $15.00 a month and you are good to get set. Then you get get a free template at places like http://www.freewebsitetemplates.com/ and start putting your information in there with an html editor like http://www.coffeecup.com/free-editor/.  Of course you will need your own content and images if you want to change the default themes ones.

COST: $65.00-$180.00!
TIME: 3-10 hours  !
Learning Curve: Medium to Hard

If you want an affordable website with traffic then you will need to do the step above but then you will need to learn SEO and invest some time and effort in marketing your site. If you have the time you can try some methods available out there but they are time consuming and take months to see results.

TIME: 3-10 hours  !
Learning Curve: Medium to Hard

To summarize.  There are plenty of affordable ways to make a website but that website doesn’t guarantee you any traffic no matter how beautiful it looks.  And doing things on your own can be time consuming.  So that is where we can come in.  Creative Webs was established with the understanding that business want affordable websites.  We have packages for every scenario.  And we take of everything so you don’t have to. If you just want a site up quickly we can have it up fast as long as you have the content ready.  We have plenty of  templates ready ot go to publish to your site fast.  View our services page to view our affordable website prices.  If you need a little more custom we have a graphic designer that can create whatever you desire. And if you want to generate traffic we have the partnered with an SEO expert team that will generate that traffic for your site.  Don’t hesitate contact us and let us give you a free quote.  Try us, you will see that we are the most affordable website design firm around.

Posted in Free Tools, Tips | No Comments »

Lightbox gallery in joomla

January 17th, 2009

Image galleries are fun; there is plenty of scripts, code out in the wild wide web for free download. A very nice script(s) is lightbox.  But the problem is that it doesn’t play nice with joomla a free content management system. A content management system is just an easy way to manage content on a page. So you don’t need to be a programmer to make updates, etc.  I will later write down a detailed article on what is a content management system.

So on to the problem. Joomla loads some script by defaults that enable some kool things mostly on the backend( the part used by the people in charge to add pages, etc). Regular users can’t access this part. Any who. It loads two scripts; mootools.js and caption.js.

But to use the lightbox script the mootools.js causes problems. At least that was my diagnosis. So I needed to disable mootools.js to get the scripts in lightbox to work properly.  So of course no need to re-event the wheel, a quicked google searched returned this post. The script to remove the scripts(mootool.js and caption.js) worked fine, except that it also disabled another plugin I was using to include the custom gallery scripts into a page(article).  I didn’t want to include the gallery code in every page since only one page will have a gallery so I download the Joomla plugin toheader. Here is a good post about it. Toheader allows you to put custom code the head section of pages.

So far I was able to remove the mootools.js and caption.js files from being loaded, but it also broke the toheader plugin since it just deleted any dynamic information that could be written to the head section of the page. Only the head section from the template was there. So I now had another problem. So I decided just to remove the mootools.js from loading and nothing else. This should keep the toheader plugin working. So luckily the remove mootools.js post linked to above had code to do just that. So that is what I did and everything worked out fine. yay!

So now I have a page(article) that loads specific head code to that page to make a gallery. None of the others pages load that code since they don’t need it. But since I removed the mootools.js from the template file if I ever need something that depends on that script I will run in to trouble, but meanwhile all is ok.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Chrome is not ready for main street

January 17th, 2009

Like all geeky people out there, once Google’s Chrome browser came out. I downloaded and installed it. I read the cartoon that explained a little of how it worked under hood. Its pretty information and it was a good read. Unfortunately, well its a good browser but its not ready for prime time. Maybe in a few years it will be ready. It has a lot of catching up to do with Firefox.

The reasoning and logic, which you can read about in the cartoon, for creating a new browser makes sense but since they pretty much started from scratch they still have lots of features to add.  But I am sure that once they get lots of the kinks worked out, and add all those features that make Firefox so good, the Google browser will slowly gain a wide audience.  Specially since people do love google products like good docs, gmail, picasa, etc.

Posted in Browsers, Free Tools | No Comments »

Nostalgic for Opera’s Rewind Button!

January 17th, 2009

The Opera browser is yet another alternative to Inernet Explorer and its really good. For older computer with less processing power and ram, Opera is great. The only reason I don’t use it all the time is because I have many extensions in Firefox that I need to use.

Either way Opera does have this great feature that I wish Firefox had and that is a a rewind button.

opera-rewind-button

The Left arrow is the regular back button, but the double left arrow is the rewind button and its great. Here is how it works.  The following is an exerp from the Opera website.

Specifically, what happens when you rewind is that you go back to one of these points in your history, whichever is latest:

*    The last page you visited on a server, if you have left the server
*    The first page you visited on a server

Suppose that you have a browsing history like the following:

1. www.opera.com
2. www.opera.com/about
3. www.opera.com/download
4. www.opera.com/mini
5. widgets.opera.com
6. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock42
7. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock43
8. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock44
9. mini.opera.com

Rewinding will then take you back through the URLs that are emphasized in the above list.

So why is this good? Because it saves you tons of clicks.   Say you go to google and  search for ‘computing tips’. You will get tons of sites. You click on first result and go to that website, call it example.com . The site is good and you visit 12 pages of its site. But you want to go back to google’s results to check out other sites.   With the  traditional back button you have to click back 12 times to get back to google, or with Firefox you can click drop down box and try and find google’s result page.   Those methods are fine , they are just too messy or waste time. With Opera’s rewind button you are back where you want to be with 2 clicks. The first click will take you back to the first page you visited on example.com then the next click your back to where you want to be. Google’s results page.  Then you can visit the next result.

I used Opera for bit at a time, but every time I use other browsers I find myself missing this feature. All browsers should definitely implement it. :)

What do you guys think? Should browsers implement it? If you have not tried it, download opera and use it for a week and see what happens. :)

Posted in Browsers, Free Tools | 2 Comments »

Getdropbox doing something right!

January 17th, 2009

A few days ago I received an invite from the team at www.getdropbox.com.  I had totally forgotten that a few months or weeks I signed up to be one of their beta testers. So the invite arrived. Of course I was totally no idea what exactly the software did so I again took at look at their video on their home page. And wow, did I get excited.  And that doesn’t happen to often.

I won’t explain the whole features since their video which is only a few minutes long does a great job explaining how drop box works.

The company plan on charging for their software, but right now you get 2.0 gigs of free space as a beta tester. The awesome thing about dropbox is that is works just like  plain folder except with cooler features.  To start off you download the software, then you have to link it to your account( you create a dropbox account).  When your dropbox account you can link computers to your account. The reason for linking seems to be the following. Your email and password for your account provide the necessary information to keep track of whatfiles you have in your dropbox folder, since there is also in online interface where you can acess files online.

The neat thing lies in the following. So your dropbox folder functions just like a folder. Its sorta like a shared folder. So say you have three computers. Laptop at home, desktop at home and work pc. All in different locations. With drop box you install the software and link the accounts. All three computers will have a folder called  My Dropbox inside My documents folder.  The awesomness lies in that when you put any file in any of the My Dropbox folder in any of the computers, those changes to that folder migrate to the other computers. So say in my home desktop computer I put 3 pictures. Those 3 pictures will magically appear in the My Dropbox folder of all the other computers. Is not that awesome. So its sorta like shared folder in a windows home or office network, but here you can be in different part of the world, no need to be in same physical network.  So that is only one the kool things about getdropbox.

Another extremely cool thing is the following.  Say I wanted to show someone a picture briefly. If I send them a picture of an attachment they will have record of it forever.  What if I just want them to see it for a second.  Well since the world wide web is ment to be public it is very hard to do that, but you can come close if the other person is not too computer savvy.  My Dropbox folder comes with a handy Public folder. You can put any thing inside this folder and anythign that you put inside this folder has a public url. So you can copy that url and send it to someone. When they are done with the link, just delete the file in the folder and that file, picture will no longer be visible.

Lastly, you can share folder with friends.  Say you have a folder of  picture you want to share with family member but not your friends. You can set to share certain folder by email invitation. So when your family members get their invite and create their account , right inside their drop box they will see that   folder you shared and none of your other drop box files. So now you can add pictures to that folder and whomever you shared it with, will view all changes.  Which is very vey neat.  This way you can share folder with diferent sets of friends.

I have a few invites… so if you want to give it a try send me a comment with your e-mail.

Posted in Software, What is | No Comments »

Open Office Writer beats Microsoft Word 2007

January 17th, 2009

So I am the occasional typist. I pop open Microsoft Word 2007 when I need to type something fast and need to correct it.  The grammar check and spell check is pretty darn good…. no complaints there. But today I needed a little something more involved. I was created a 3-4 page report, with nested list number list and bullet list.  I tried for about 30 minutes a simple example to get everything to align correctly. But I simply couldn’t.   Its probably due to the fact that I have not studied the new interface, but well to me it seems that it should be pretty intuitive.  The goal was something like this.

1.0 Main

1.1 submain

*

*

2.0

What a pain, just to get the simple thing. I would click multi-list button and i would be the first item. If i gave it heading 1, the number would dissapear. For the sub items I tried looking for heading 2. But no where to be find. I didn’t want the identation for subitems… no where to be found(probably cuz i don’t know where to look)… i wasted too much time.. I admit I was doing it in word because the different styles look good, but i now I just wanted it to work. I gave up.

I soon pop up. Openoffice writer.  Quickly I had a multi-list. I quickly realized that the headings(heading1,heading2, etc) correspond to items on multist. So all I had to do was type something and give it heading 1 or heading 2 and it would automatically know what number to put beside it. also I found the ‘bullets  and numbering’ button and wow. Everything is there.  Level by level. You click on level one, you can adjust the numbering scheme, the indentation, everything .wow. Click on level two and do the same. I wanted level 1 and level 2 to look exactly the same, I just changed heading 2 to look like heading 1. What a freeze. Took me 15 minutes to get the hang out it.. And now I have a 4 page document looking good… and i just tested the table of contents feature… and wow. Automatically created it. :)

So Word is good… but when you on the run and need to create somethign fast with multilist… somethign simpler like Open office write could save tons of head aches and hassle.

Posted in Free Tools, Software, What is | 2 Comments »

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