Marketing Websites: August 2005

10 Reasons To Write A Press Release

10 Reasons To Write A Press Release

1. You’ve started a new business.
2. You’ve moved into a new location.
3. You have created an exciting seasonal promotion.
4. You are donating part of your profits to a charity.
5. You work with others in your community.
6. You won an award.
7. You created a partnership with a neighborhood business.
8. You can offer tips to help people in the wedding industry.
9. You can offer advice to families sending kids back to school.
10. You can talk about being a small business owner.

The purpose of a press release is to let the media know of a good story. Every business has multiple stories. Share them with your local media.

Every community has multiple sources of media readily available to them. Take a look at your own community. Here in Denver, we have access to:

5 major television stations
Dozens of cable channels with a wide variety of programming
2 major daily newspapers
Several business publications
Dozens of radio stations
Dozens of local community papers, trade publications and local magazines

I know your community is very similar. Each of these sources is constantly looking for good quality information to share with their audience. Imagine having to create a 100-page newspaper every day. Or putting together 3 hours of newscast every day. The job can be overwhelming if you can’t find good human-interest stories. Your job is to provide them stories!

There are many books that show you how to write a press release. Two of my favorites are:

How To Get Publicity by William Parkhurst
Guerrilla Publicity by Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman and Jill Lublin

I would also recommend that you sign up for a wonderful ezine by Paul Hartunian. He is an expert on publicity, and has wonderful advice for people trying to increase business through the use of publicity. Check out http://www.hartunian.com/

Website Marketing for Illinois Photographers

Website Marketing for Photographers
Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Illinois Wedding Photographers

Website Marketing for Texas Photographers

Website Marketing for Texas Photographers
Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Texas Wedding Photographers

Website Marketing for California Photographers

Website Marketing for California Photographers
Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, California Wedding Photographers

Website Marketing for Florida Photographers

Website Marketing for Florida Photographers
Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Florida Wedding Photographers

Website Marketing for Georgia Photographers

Website Marketing for Georgia Photographers Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Georgia Wedding Photographers

Website Marketing for Texas Photographers

Website Marketing for Texas PhotographersRangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Rangefinder, Professional Photographers of America, Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop, Nikon, Canon, Digital Photography, WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographer International, Fuji, Kodak, Photojournalism, Weddings, Portraits, Texas Wedding Photographers

Custom Designed Websites

VisionOfSuccess.com can create a custom designed website for today’s clients. Our goal is to show that your business is ready for the next step in website design. Each website design is search engine friendly on all major search engines like google.com, yahoo.com, altavista.com and msn.com. Please visit our site and see how we can make your site soar in this competitive market.

Competition or Collaboration

Most people go into business, and hide all of their ideas from their competition. They may join industry related groups, but they keep their core ideas and concepts hidden and well protected.

After you've been in business a while, you soon discover that there is more business out there than is humanly possible to cover with one business. Instead, it's much more exciting to join up with other businesses, and combine efforts to create a truly exciting business.

Competition holds you down. Collaboration lets you fly higher than the stars.

Just today I spoke with what some may consider to be my competitor. However, he is focusing his efforts in a completely different direction. But he offers some side products that would combine with mine, and offer incredible tools to our clients. Instead of looking at him as competition, I'm now piecing part of his products with mine, and providing us both with increased sales potential.

Win/win for both businesses.

How can you link up with your competition, and provide incredible services for your clients?

Market Promotions

I received an interesting email from MediaPost Communications today. It seems that:

The 65+ market in America:
42% have used a computer
41% have a computer at home
31% have ever gone online
33% have Internet access at home

The over 65 population is the fastest growing group of people coming online and using the Internet for daily activities. Of those online, 93% are using email regularly.

Other findings include:
68% have checked the weather online
67% read news online
58% go online for hobby information
57% have bought a product such as books, clothes, or plane tickets online.
53% search for health and medical information
53% browse for fun

What are you doing to promote to this group of people? If you have been promoting children's photography to parents with kids between 0-7, what about grandchildren's photography?

My mother loves having grandma/granddaughter portraits with my daughter. And she sends those photographs to all of her friends, and uses them to brag over lunches with her friends.

Word Tracking for your Website Marketing

When you are writing up your text for your website, do you use the words your clients do?

When a search engine ranks a site, it doesn't understand that

website
websites
web site
Web Site
Web Sites

are the same word. When it sends a spider through your site to rank it, it counts up the number of times it uses each word.

Then when a person comes in and types in to the search engine "websites", the search engine will pull together a list of all webpages that used the word "websites" and provides the list to the viewer.

Those people that used "website" or "Web Sites" missed out on being a part of that search.

So the question is, do you write your text in differrent ways? Do you anaylze what people are typing in for searches? Places like www.WordTracker.com can provide you with information on what keywords are similar, and what else you might try using.

PR to Market your Business

Good PR is a matter of taking a current news event, and turning it into a story focused on your business.

Take the recent case of Jennifer Wilbanks, the bride who disappeared from her Atlanta home days before her lavish wedding.

This is a great opportunity for all of you wedding photographers. Send a press release to the media in your area talking about the implications of having a last minute cancellation. How does that effect your business? What does it mean to the wedding industry as a whole? How do contracts protect you from situations like this?

All of this is newsworthy. The media loves relating stories to current events. Give them a story, and you'll get the coverage!

Blogging is an interesting word.

Blogging is an interesting word. The first time you hear it, you think you misheard what the speaker was saying. Let’s face it, blogging as a word does not bring about flowery images.

But blogging has become an important part of the online world. A blog is an online journal. It contains information relating to the theme of the website. Many political candidates now use blogs to track their daily activity, and provide important insight to their constituents. But whatever you use to use blogging for, it is an easy way to record your thoughts directly on to your website.

Blogging is an easy tool to put on to your website. You can simply create a page in which you consistently go in and record your thoughts on a timely basis. I provide a blogging service on one of my websites by recording new ideas in a message board format.

There is also software available to provide you with easy tools to put up a weblog.

TypePad
Radio UserLand
Xanga
Blogger
Moveable Type

Doing more online

As I sat down in front of my computer this morning, I started thinking about all the things I now do online, that I used to have to run all over for.

Banking
Renew library books
Shopping
Research
Mailing letters/cards
Keep in contact with my daughter's school
Plan vacations
Buy tickets
Make reservations

Obviously I could go on and on. But much of what I used to spend hours running around for, I now spend a significantly less amount of time on.

Value is found in convenience. What type of convenience do you offer your customers? Everyone needs to build their websites and market a website that includes all of the tools for your clients to use.

What does the term viral marketing mean?

What does the term viral marketing mean?

It's a form of marketing in which the user is actually promoting the company that provides a service.

When you send an ecard to someone, he or she has to go to that particular website to look at it. You become a marketer for that company, because the receiver now has the cabability to browse the site, and possibly make a purchase.

That's one of the reasons I like custom ecards. With companies like boomerangnetwork.com you can insert your own photographs (each of your clients photographs) and have them send out ecards to their family and friends. When they pick up their greeting, they return to your site, and have the ability to click through your site, and possibly become a paying client! naturally.

Google changed everything.

They built Google on the concept of good, quality information, not just loading up your keywords, and other optimization website techniques.

Instead of trying to capture every word you can think of, try focusing on a select few.

If you do in-studio portraits in the Denver area, why would you want to use "baby portraits" as your key word, and get hits from all over the world?

By becoming more focused, your site will actually begin to rank higher, and will be more targeted for the people that are actually looking for you.

*Use your keyword multiple times on one page of your website. So if you want to do baby portraits in Denver, concentrate on that phrase, and use it multiple times on a page. Then in your html coding, list the phrase "baby portraits in Denver". Working together, this will drive up your ranking.

*Remember your website has multiple pages. You don't have to use the same keywords on each page. Design 10 different pages targeting 10 different niches. Search engine spiders look at every page separately. That's the beauty of having a large website.

*Multiple domain names can also help. Buying BabyPortraitsInDenver.com and pointing it to the page on your website that is loaded with keywords will also help you in your ranking.

*Content is king. Don't fill your pages with the same phrase over and over. It should make sense to the reader. Just write naturally, and create about 250 words minimum for each website page. Fit your keywords in naturally.

Website Design for the small business – Making your site standout above the crowd

Website Design for the small business doesn’t need to cost an enormous sum of money but should be flexible with your clients needs. Create a website navigation to entice the visitor to explore. We all know that marketing a website will take your new Website Design for the small business to the next level. Our goal for our Website Design for the small business is to grow the clients sales.

Website Design for the photographer – Making your site standout above the crowd

Website Design for the photographer doesn’t need to cost an enormous sum of money but should be flexible with your clients needs. Create a website navigation to entice the visitor to explore. We all know that marketing a website will take your new website design for the photographer to the next level. Our goal for our website design for the photographer is to grow the clients sales.

Website Design – Making your site standout above the crowd

Website Design doesn’t need to cost an enormous sum of money but should be flexible with your clients needs. Create a website navigation to entice the visitor to explore. We all know that marketing a website will take your new website design to the next level. Our goal for our website design is to grow the clients sales.

4 Things The Search Engines Hate

4 Things The Search Engines Hate

1. Irrelevant links.Have you ever heard of link farms? There are businesses that will create backend pages filled with links. Links will raise your ranking tremendously. A few years ago businesses set up practice to fill your website with links to raise you in the rankings. The search engines have now caught on, and frown upon this method.

2. Irrelevant keywords. Only use keywords relevant to the text on your site. Especially in your meta tags and descriptions. Adding keywords that may be in your marketing plan, but have nothing to do with the text in your website may end up penalizing you.

3. Mega keywords.When you list keywords, do you list everything you can think of, in every combination possible? Many designers will still tell you to list hundreds of keywords. This is not the case. Instead, focus on a select few words that are relevant to your website.

4. Hidden keyword pages.Never create hidden pages on your website who’s sole purpose is to have listed strings of text related to your keywords, or simply rows and rows or keyword text. In the past, this was an easy way of getting higher rankings. Today search engines may drop you from their listing if they catch these hidden pages.

For more information:

VisionOfSuccess.com

Overture Launches Local Search Listings to Web Sites
One of the most common phrases I hear when talking with people about their websites is “But I’m just a local company – I don’t need a website yet.”

If you’re “just a local company”, now’s the perfect time to have a website, and begin marketing to just the local neighborhood.

Overture just announced its Local Match service. It allows you to precisely target customers who use search engines to make local buying decisions.

Have you ever gone to the search engine and typed in something like “plumber Denver”. I know I do that all the time. I haven’t used a phone book in 4 years. Instead, I do all my searches either through a search engine or a listing search such as DexOnline.com.

I’m sure I’m not alone.

Now with Local Match, you can target those types of people effectively. So even if you specialize in senior portraiture, and don’t want to market beyond a 10-mile radius of your studio, you can begin targeting people online.

Local Match works like other Overture services. You pay by determining the price you’re willing to pay per lead. The more money you are willing to pay, the more your listing will be displayed. Begin with as little as $20 on account.

One final fact. Local Match will initially be displayed on Yahoo!, Alta Vista, AlltheWeb, InfoSpace, Citysearch and other popular Web sites.

Marketing with eCards

Using eCards as a Marketing Tool
One of my favorite ways of marketing is using eCards.
ECards are electronic greeting cards. When someone visits your site, they select one of your images, choose to make it into a greeting card, write what they want said, and email it out to their family member or friend.
When someone receives an eCard from a friend in to their email box, they will open it. They will look at it, and they will read it. The beauty of an eCard using your photography is it will motivate the receiver to want to come back into your site, and find out more information. You have a guaranteed traffic building system.
Once the receiver picks up their eCard, they’re actually back on your site. The navigation buttons are there for them to begin browsing through your site. They have access to your images, and have the possibility of purchasing images from you, or contacting you for more information.
With photographs, people are motivated to purchase when they see your photographs. If they have instant availability to make a purchase, the purchase process is easy.
Want to see how eCards work? Give it a try!

Network

Have you ever heard of WorldWIT? http://www.worldwit.org/ It's a great group of women (and some men too) involved in the world of technology. And if you're reading this - you qualify! There are many different regions available to join as a part of WorldWIT. I've joined RockyWIT. The great thing about this organization is the way they network. Once a day I receive an email from RockyWIT. Every member is free to email in questions, comments or general "shop" talk. Then the emails are compiled into one email and mailed out to the members. The great thing about this is people ask all kinds of questions - personal and professional. The last few days have brought questions on: recommendation for a dentist looking for a meeting space for 20 people Job posting for a computer engineer more information on time share opportunities looking for a nanny for the summer As you can see, postings are on just about everything. I personally have created a strategic partnership by making contact through a posting. I have met the editor of a local magazine, and may have the ability to write articles in the future. And that's just in the past month! My point is to try something new. Get out and meet people. Share your story. Ask for things you need next in life. You'll be surprised at what you might find.
Visit one of our sites VirtualPhotographyStudio.com

Custom Designed Websites

VisionOfSuccess.com can create a custom designed website for today’s clients. Our goal is to show that your business is ready for the next step in website design. Each website design is search engine friendly on all major search engines like google.com, yahoo.com, altavista.com and msn.com. Please visit our site and see how we can make your site soar in this competitive market.