Category: Marketing and Social Networking
Posted by John Sundberg in Business, Marketing and Social Networking Friday, 29 January 2010 View Comments
The February online edition of Entrepreneur Magazine has an article titled “What You Don’t Know About SEO,” which you can find at this link. The subtitle for the article reads, “It’s essential to understand SEO before you spend thousands hiring consultants you may not even need,” and is a good summary of the substance of the article. SEO, an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing a website to be most visible to search engines like Google.
A Real Example
Included in the article is a “case study” of a marketing agency that, incredibly, “hired and fired roughly 20 SEO firms in the years after opening its doors in 2005.” Twenty different firms? That’s amazing and alarming, all at the same time. What’s more amazing is that they were paying as much as $12,000 per month for these SEO services. Sounds like SEO consulting is a lucrative business to be in, if perhaps not an especially honest business. According to Peter Kent, author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, “The SEO business is 80 percent scam.” Wow.
Posted by John Sundberg in Marketing and Social Networking, Website Projects Saturday, 26 December 2009 View Comments
The latest project completed at Black Hills Web Works is a new website for Legends and Legacies, a local furniture and accessory retailer in Spearfish, SD.
According to their website Legends and Legacies specializes in “custom, one-of-a-kind furniture and accessory pieces, ranging from handcrafted log furniture, custom sofas and chairs, dining sets and bedroom ensembles to complementary accessories such as rugs, Native American art and wildlife prints, candles, pottery and lush throws.”
A virtual showcase for products
The primary purpose of their website is to showcase the unique and beautiful products they sell. This was accomplished in several ways.
The front or home page (see the above screenshot) has three separate slideshows that automatically rotate through a random selection of photos. With sixty photos to choose from, the variety of potential combinations helps to ensure that the content will stay “fresh” well into the future.
The product showcase is divided into four areas — living room, dining room, bedroom, and accessories — and each area uses “pop-up” photo galleries to allow clients to browse through the wide variety of furniture and accessory pieces and collections available at Legends and Legacies.
Additionally, the website features an interactive, embedded Google map for directions to the store, a welcome letter from owner and founder Janet Frame, and a contact form.
Social Media and other details
In today’s world social media can be important to the success of any business, and we’ve set-up a Twitter account and a Facebook fan page for Legends and Legacies, and registered them with the Google Local Business Center. In the near future we’ll be showing them how to use Twitter and Facebook to start making connections with clients, friends, and others in their community and around the world.
The website is powered by the latest version of Joomla!, a Content Management System (CMS), and is based on the Infuse template from RocketTheme.
The website can be found at www.legendsandlegaciesllc.com.
Posted by John Sundberg in Marketing and Social Networking Sunday, 1 November 2009 View Comments
November in the Black Hills is starting out with some beautiful fall weather, so this afternoon Amy, the girls and I went for a drive through the Hills and a hike around Mt. Rushmore. While we were there we struck up a conversation with a woman from Wisconsin who had just flown in to work with some of her clients this week in Rapid City.
She works for a company called Kronos that provides workforce management software systems for thousands of companies, and her ‘vertical’ (new term for me – another word for category) is health care providers such as hospitals. We started talking about IT and websites and social media and then she suggested an interesting idea – companies (organizations, etc.) potentially moving away from having a website to just using Facebook as their website/online presence. My response was that websites and social media should definitely complement each other, but I didn’t think social media would be replacing websites anytime soon.
After leaving Mt. Rushmore we ventured over to Rapid City and Borders book store, where I headed for the Business section and zeroed in on the book Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel. (Check out Mitch’s blog) I hadn’t heard of the book before but the subtitle caught my eye: “Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone.” Now this seemed to be right in line with what I’ve been thinking and learning about lately so I started reading and ended up bringing it home with me. (The 40% coupon didn’t hurt the decision process!)
Posted by John Sundberg in Marketing and Social Networking Monday, 5 October 2009 View Comments
One reason to consider blocking people from following you on Twitter…
