Blog•
on March 31st, 2010•
I often encourage my clients to use Craigslist to promote their businesses. I just had a client tell me yesterday that he got two new customers as a result of a recent ad placed on Craigslist.
The main benefits of using Craigslist are that the ads can be placed in local markets, they are free to set up, and you can have an ad up and running in under 10 minutes.
I have done the following using Craigslist:
- Found a renter for my condo – twice (no agent commission)
- Sold a number of items such as electronics, musical instruments, and household items
- Obtained music gigs for my violin playing
- Sold a number of items for other people where I have taken a commission for the sale
Here is a list of steps to get yourself up and running on Craigslist:
- Go to www.craigslist.org and find your city. Click on that city.
- Within that page, click on “My Accounts” on the left-hand side of the screen.
- Sign up for an account with Craigslist (it’s free)
- Once you have that squared away, sign in to your new account. You are now ready to place your first ad.
- Click on “Post to Classifieds” on the left-hand side of the screen.
- Find the appropriate Type of Posting for your product or service.
- Start with a catchy title for your item, then add a description. Use a price that gives you a little room for negotiation.
- Add Photos under “Add / Edit Images!!! Very important. I’ve found that people respond better to ads with photos. You can add up to 4 images.
- Click on “Continue” and fulfill the rest of the steps.
- Since you have created a Craigslist account, every time you sign in, you will be able to see the ads that you have currently running and the ones you have done in the past. This also provides easy access to delete your ad once you have sold the product or service.
My recommendation is to re-post your advertisement every 6 – 10 days. If you try to re-post under that time frame, Craigslist will try to stop you. The newest ads show up first as people search for products or services. Therefore, it is best to refresh your ad so it is higher up on the list.
Although Craigslist is a great tool, I must also warn you of some potential problems:
- There are a lot of people trying to take your money on Craigslist. If an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is. For instance, if someone from the UK wants to buy your piano for twice as much as the price and ship it to the UK using FedEx, it’s not real. As a general rule, I would stay away from international orders.
- If you sell a product and are to meet to exchange the product for money, choose a well-lit area with many people around. I always recommend taking one other person along with you so that you are not alone.
A final tip – for further safety, Craigslist allows you to use an anonymous email address instead of your personal one. Do this to avoid potential spammers.
Any questions about using Craigslist – go ahead and leave a comment to this post.
Blog•
on March 27th, 2010•
I just returned from an Online Marketing Conference put on by StomperNet in Atlanta. The conference runs through Sunday, but I left a day and a half early. I walked out of 2 keynote speeches and wanted to walk out of the third today. It was an astonishing disappointment.
Apparently they were able to charge a low price for the conference by allowing all of their speakers the chance to pitch their products. So, the speakers didn’t actually teach anything about online marketing, they just spent their allotted time pitching their product.
I felt violated. I spent money to attend the conference to learn about online marketing and instead I sat through commercials.
As someone attending the conference in order to learn how to better market the websites of my clients, I ended up pulling away very little about the topic that was to be the focus of the conference – “Online Marketing.” StomperNet has pulled away from the core of what made them good in order to make a quick profit.
I guess the main thing I pulled away from the conference was that staying true to your core values as a company and staying true to what you do best will keep people more interested in the long run than violating trust and going for the quick money. StomperNet has a great pool of knowledge on SEO and Online Marketing and they didn’t tap it at all. Thanks for the unintended lesson StomperNet.
Blog•
on March 26th, 2010•
I’m currently attending the StomperNet Online Marketing conference in Midtown, Atlanta. It is a 3 day event focused on teaching the tools necessary for increasing traffic to your website for your own business or for your client’s business.
This is my second conference like this that I have attended. One of the ways I learn the most is by listening in as they do website reviews for conference attendees. Internet experts will tear apart a website and describe what should be done instead and what the current best practices are.
Some of the interesting topics I pulled this morning were:
- Help users navigate through your website. Assume that your user needs help in knowing where to go and where to click.
- The average user does not read text on a website. You are lucky if they scan your bullet points.
- Many people will access your website through an inner page, so navigation must be self-explanatory on every page.
Looking forward to picking up more knowledge on how to create better websites.
Portfolio•
on March 24th, 2010•
Company:
5 Wives
Website Link:
http://www.5wives.com/
Date Launched:
March 2010
Design / Development Notes:
WordPress, HTML, CSS, PHP
What I Learned:
This is the first site where I included a small/quick contact form on the home page. I like this because it allows for someone to quickly request service from 5 Wives without having to go to an inner contact page.
Also, I launched this site within a 5 day time period. It was a rush order for the client.
Blog•
on March 17th, 2010•
Research company Hitwise just reported that Facebook passed Google as the most visited website in the USA last week. Facebook had 7.07% of all visits to the web and Google had 7.03%. The bigger side to this story is that Facebook’s traffic is growing at rapid rates while Google’s traffic has more or less plateaued.
This has enormous implications for online marketing. What this says is that people trust Friend Results more than Google Search Results. This may be obvious to marketers everywhere, but have online marketing companies changed tactics for their clients?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seeks to place a website high in Google rankings. This is still valuable. Extremely valuable. You’ve heard the joke, ‘what do you call someone who is #1 in google for a particular keyword?’ – A millionaire.
But SEO is step 1. If there are 30 movies at the movie theater, which one do you see? You see the one your buddy John recommended. Same is happening with websites. Google may point you to the best 30 websites for purchasing a used guitar, but your buddy John, who purchased a guitar last month and had a great experience, will help you weed through the noise.
This is the power of a Facebook network. I see my friends make posts all the time that ask for recommendations for certain products or services. And many people respond with good or bad experiences from specific companies.
Other ways we are seeing recommendations take place are in sites like Angie’s List. Angie’s List allows people to rate contractors. You need a plumber, you search here and see what your neighbors have ranked plumbers in the area. Now, you are not trying to do a Google search to find a random plumber, but you are basing your decision on reputation.
Portfolio•
on March 15th, 2010•
Company:
Dan’s Motorcycles
Website Link:
Atlanta Motorcycle Rentals
Date Launched:
March 2010
Design / Development Notes:
WordPress, HTML, CSS, PHP
What I Learned:
I learned how to connect a form with a payment option. This website allows someone to register for the motorcycle they would like to rent and submit a deposit for the rental. Also, one of the first sites I used Cufon Font Replacement.
Blog•
on March 12th, 2010•
You’ve probably seen URL’s that start with the following:
http://tinyurl.com
http//ow.ly
http://bit.ly
What these companies do is to take your super long URL – http://www.yoursite.com/store/clothing/t-shirts/large/white/productnumber2389qw2345987 and turn it into a very short URL.
There are many reasons to shorten a URL. Here are some of the most important reasons:
- To paste in an email. If you convert your long URL to a short one, it looks a lot nicer when you link to that URL in an email.
- To hide a URL from the search engines. For instance, if you are working on a website for a client and have a question about that site in a forum, it is better to hide the URL by using one of these services.
- You can create a catchy phrase. Services like TinyURL let you create a custom alias. So, you could have http://tinyurl.com/custom. This might be easier to share with someone than a long company name or a URL that is extremely long.
- Twitter – with a limit of just 140 characters, you almost need to use a URL shortener if you are linking within your tweet.
My personal favorite one is TinyURL. I’m a little biased, as the founder of TinyURL was an acquaintance of mine growing up in Minnesota. I’m really proud of Kevin Gilbertson for starting TinyURL.
For more information on URL shortening services, click here.
Blog•
on March 10th, 2010•
For a recent website design of mine, I received some interesting feedback from a blind user. It had never crossed my mind to design websites in a way in which they would make sense if they were read aloud to the user. Blind users likely access your site through a Screen Reader, meaning they hear your website instead of see it.
The more I got to thinking about this, I realized that creating websites with the blind in mind just might help in search engine rankings as well.
Consider the following suggestions that I received from the blind user. Most of these will also assist in your Search Engine Optimization techniques:
- Use Alt text for every image. This is SEO 101, but be descriptive in the alternative text you use for the image. The blind user will hear this text, so describe the image using keywords relevant to your page copy.
- Use a healthy balance of text and images. I know the trend is fewer words and more images, but make sure the point of each page is clearly stated not only visually but also in your text copy.
- Don’t have music auto-load when the user opens up the website. For someone hearing the site read out to them, this interferes and can be difficult to find where to turn the music off.
- Use Alt text for links. I rarely do this, but think about it. If you just post a text link in your page copy without including alternative text, the full link is read aloud, numbers and all, instead of “Link to Atlanta Plumber.”
- Flash cannot be read to a blind person. Flash is read aloud as a button. Google can’t read Flash, iPhones don’t display Flash, and the blind user can’t hear Flash. If you are going to use Flash, don’t place it at the top section of the page. This will be the first thing the blind user hears. If your entire page is Flash, you have completely alienated the blind user.
You can find further information on website design at the links below:
American Foundation for the Blind
I made a discovery over the weekend that has pretty big implications for my website design. There has always been a limitation in designing Search Engine Optimized (SEO) websites and using different fonts. As a designer, I tell the web browser which font to pull for a particular website. That user’s computer must have that font loaded for the page to show as intended. If the user does not have that font, then it goes to another font such as any sans-serif font loaded on that user’s computer.
In order to make sites that show up the same on most user’s computers, you are thus limited to very few fonts that you can use (Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, Helvetica to name a few).
One way around this is to create an image of the text in the font that you like and insert that into the page. The problem with this is that Google can’t read the text within an image. They can read the alt text for that image, but placing “Atlanta Plumber” within <h1> tags places more weight on the term than having a fancy font image say the same words.
So, to make search engine friendly sites, one had to use a handful of fonts that limited design capabilities.
Until now…
Cufon has introduced a simple Javascript-based solution that solves the design and SEO problems. This solution transforms text on a page into your font of choice while keeping the actual text within the code of the page.
If you have an <h1> tag around “Atlanta Plumber,” you can now specify the exact font to use and Atlanta Plumber will still show up as an <h1> tag in your code for SEO purposes.
Below, I have listed the basic instructions on how to implement this into your website. This solution works in all major browsers (IE 6.0 and up, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera). You can also utilize this feature using a basic HTML website or for a website using a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla.
Instructions
- Locate a font of your choice at Font Squirrel. Font Squirrel offers an array of fonts that are 100% free for commercial use.
- Download this font. It’s in a zip file and the actual font will be in an .otf or .ttf format.
- Copy this javascript code and place it at the root level of your website (FTP client required) in a javascript file titled cufon-yui.js.
- Use the font file generator to transmit your font of choice into a JavaScript file.
- Upload this generated JavaScript file to the root level of your website.
- Place this code within the <Head> section of your website:
<script src="cufon-yui.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="Vegur_300.font.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
Cufon.replace('h1');
</script>
- This will replace all <h1> tags with the Vegur font in this case.
- Now take a look at your <h1> tag text on your website and notice the new font.
Benefits
- Use any font imaginable on your website.
- Easy & fast to implement.
- Solves the SEO problem listed above of using different fonts while still being Search Engine Friendly.
- Exceptionally fast.
Caveats
- Can’t apply a hover status to links, although links still work.
- Can’t utilize some CSS code for the text such as text shadow.
- It’s JavaScript, it must load, and could take a little more time to load your page, although this is the fastest solution available at the moment.
- If the user of the website does not have JavaScript loaded, fonts will show up as dictated in CSS instead of your new fancy font.
Click here for further instructions such as utilizing multiple fonts on one page.
I am convinced that many website designers will not have a job within a few years. So many options are available that make designing & developing a website with little website knowledge easier each day. Soon, anyone with basic Internet know-how will be able to put together a fairly complicated website that looks nice.
But this doesn’t mean that every company, band, person, or organization will be able to develop a website that best meets their needs. How can they best inform, market, or sell their product online? What strategy should they pursue for Search Engine Optimization or in Online Marketing? Simple design options will not answer these questions.
Therefore, the future belongs to the website designers who act more as consultants than designers. They are the people willing to challenge their clients with the direction of their website instead of designing based upon specs provided by the company. They are the people spending as much time studying new online marketing strategies as they are the newest design methods.
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