http://www.colourlovers.com

I did four mockups, but this is the one I liked best…

It’s clean, it’s punchy, and exactly the image of a solid but modern company. The picture at the top was to be a photo slideshow of all of the recent work they have completed, which is pretty impressive.

Abite

http://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/sets/72157616350171741/

This is a great example of what someone with a little creativity can put together and have a lot of fun doing it.

I’ve come across a couple of different uses for Twitter:

• Social networking
• Constant contacting

I’m sure there are more things to use Twitter for, but for the purposes of my blog, I like to stick to what I know and understand.

Here’s how Twitter works: sign up for an account and then post “tweets” on your account. Tweets are 140 character or less messages. Other people sign up to follow you, which means that they receive your tweets in one of a couple of ways. Either  they can login to Twitter.com and check who they are following, opt-in to receiving the tweets by email, receive them on their SMS via cell phone, or use one of the many Twitter apps that have sprung up over the last couple of years.

I have to admit something now: I signed up for Twitter a couple of years ago, and until this year didn’t really know what to do with it. I was recently talking to the marketing manager of Western Rivers Expeditions and they have a Twitter account and aren’t doing anything with it. I imagine a lot of you have Twitter accounts and aren’t doing much with them.

I suppose Twitter is about being connected. The origins of the site revolve around text messaging. Originally, you signed up, sent your tweets to Twitter via your phone, and received other people’s tweets the same way. I think the original model has had to embrace the other delivery methods. I don’t really know.

What I do know is that for Twitter to work for your business, you need to have something to say. Not just something to say, something relevant. Oprah could post anything to Twitter and it would be relevant. You and I? What do we post about our businesses that people will want to tune in to?

I have a couple of answers to that question: specials, alerts, coupons, or news. Two weeks ago I started a new business (part-time) cooking and delivering authentic Italian food. I use a Twitter account to tell all of my followers when the next menu is going up on the website. I only do one day a week, one dish, and very limited amounts. Twitter helps me get the word out to past customers that the new menu is available and that they can make their orders. The same would go for specials or coupons or special industry news. Maybe you could continually feed your followers with interesting quips or ideas relevant to their business or lives.

The point is relevancy. If your Twittering is not relevant, it will not help your business. On the other hand, if you can make Twitter a place where your followers can go to get more info to help themselves, it will stick for you.

The new iPhone numbers put iPhones sold somewhere around 15 million. 15 Million iPhone users means 15 million people using their phone to get to your website. Add that to the low millions of units of Google’s Android, the Blackberry Storm, and the Palm PRE and you have millions of people that are regularly using their handheld device to access the internet. The problem with these devices, for you and I, is that their small screens don’t display our 900 pixel across websites well. Even with a nice, big 3 inch screen, your site is generally going to look terrible when compared with how it looks on a large machine like a laptop or desktop.

What’s the solution? How do we conquer the limitations these devices place on our designs?

Scripting coupled with handheld specific websites. If you are running WordPress, there is a fantastic plugin that will create a separate site for your WordPress install. If you don’t, we can create a handheld or iPhone specific site without a terrible expense. Taking the content you already have, we create a separate site that only users of the iPhone, Android, or Storm get redirected to. Scripting detects the device and then sends them to the appropriate site based on what device they are using.

The advantage? Better exposure for your site. If you can increase your site conversion by as little as 10% because iPhone users see your site easier, that could translate in to thousands of dollars of business in the long run.

Handheld devices are not the future, they are now, and ignoring this trend will cost you. It’s time to upgrade your site to be iPhone worthy…

As of this writing, Facebook claims more than 200 Million Users, more than 100 Million of which access the site on a daily basis. That’s a pretty good group of people that are using the site on a daily basis. To be sure, everyone that is in business wants a piece of that action. The problem that I have heard among the online marketers that I talk to is that Facebook is not a place for buyers. Let me go back…

There are four ways a business can use Facebook to generate business:

1. Buy Facebook Ads
2. Create and Maintain Facebook Fan Pages
3. Create and Maintain Fan Applications
4. Use Guerrilla Posting to Promote Products and Services

Again, what I hear around town is that Facebook is not a place for buyers, so buying Facebook ads is less effective. Facebook is a social network, people say. Users of Facebook don’t want to buy stuff, they just want to get on and chat with friends and share pictures and stuff.

Let me address this right now: Facebook may not be a place for buyers, but you can more effectively target your customers using Facebook ads than any other online ad marketplace I have seen. Google Adwords will let you target geographic areas and specific sites, but beyond that you are stuck to whoever sees and then clicks on your ad. Facebook ads are more specific. You want males 18-34? You got it. You want women with the word “kids” in their profile? You can target only those specific people. With Facebook ads, you can pare down your results to a wild level, unheard of even in the nichiest of marketplaces.

I have been buying ads for a book I wrote, Who Are You Really?, through Facebook, and had modest success. Honestly, buying ads to sell a book online is less effective, but I wanted to experiment with those type of ads and see how it worked before I recommended it to clients. I have had a dozen or so sales from the ads, but the good part is that ads convert well. If someone is clicking, more than half the time they are buying.

The second way to get business through Facebook is Fan pages. Fan pages can be a powerful way to communicate with your fans and to spread the word about things, as long as you have a relevant message to share. It’s akin to Twitter, where if people become a fan, they are going to get updates from your fan page and you can keep them informed. If you don’t have a relevant message to share with people on a regular basis, i.e. specials, events, new products, etc, then fan pages are less effective.

Applications can be a good way to keep in touch as long as they are fun and keep people interested. I have only seen a half dozen companies successfully pull this off. It seems like a fairly expensive way to get and keep customers…

Guerrilla posting is an art form. There are people that can do it and people that just suck. The key to being a guerrilla poster and having it be successful is two fold: get thousands of friends and be covert. I have about a thousand friends right now on Facebook, and I posted status update that invited people to help me test a new product, Contadino’s. Within minutes I had enough people for the test. Not covert, but not a solicitation for business either.

On the other side of the coin, I have one friend on Facebook (FOF) that only solicits business. I don’t want to see his ads in my updates page, I just don’t. He never has anything good to say or interesting, it’s all ads and sales. I blocked him after about a month of it…I just couldn’t take it.

One FOF that I admire is Kurt Bestor. He’s a composer and has thousands of FOFs, but the only time he is selling something is about once a month, and it usually comes in the form of a giveaway. He updates his status with fun, interesting things that are happening in his life and keeps us all informed about what he is up to professionally without selling us on anything.

Posting is an art. If you are overt in your attempt to sell people or trap them in to something in Facebook, it is really obvious and people avoid it. If you are bold and declare it as it is, without it being the only thing you ever Facebook about, then you will be better served using Facebook.

I’ll be talking more about this in the future, as well as hitting up Twitter, and iPhone/smart phone topics in the near future…

The truth is, until recently, the power of YouTube as a marketing tool was not completely exploited. It is hard to produce the kind of video that markets a product and yet captures the millions of views a good video should capture. The best example of use of video has to be the BlendTec video series “Will It Blend?”. If you haven’t seen that video, go to YouTube right now and put in Will it blend. You will have a selection of videos all answering the same question – Will it blend? BlendTec is a manufacturer of commercial blenders and every couple of weeks they film a new segment, blending wild things like tennis balls, iPods, iPhones, pens, rake handles, whatever they feel like blending. Some of them are funny, some of them are outrageous, and it is always a fun thing to watch. Because of the uniqueness of the product and the series, each of those videos has had well over millions of views. It’s the ideal in YouTube marketing…

…but, did you know that YouTube can be an ideal place to boost your long term SEO strategy? It’s true. In the description section of the upload area on YouTube, you can paste in the URL of your web site. That might not seem like a big deal, but I have had great experiences with this little feature. Google seems to like that YouTube links to your site. It doesn’t seem to matter whether people actually watch your video, but having a link to your site, along side relevant keywords and tags, makes a huge difference when talking SEO. I do a weekly video for a local chiropractor which we put on YouTube and on his website (http://www.familywellnesscenter.info). His pagerank went from one to three in a couple of weeks because of our YouTube strategy. He has had calls from all over the world about his services, but the great part is that they aren’t finding him first on YouTube, but through Google search, THEN YouTube.

Who cares where the business comes from as long as it comes, right?

I have a good friend that makes big money from AdSense, Google’s display ad service. He swears by the YouTube method. If his site comes off the first page, he puts up another video and back to the front page it goes. Obviously in high traffic and competition keywords this isn’t going to be that easy, but it can help. Next up: the iPhone