Posted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
Viral Marketing Is The Future; Catch The Wave
Here’s a little bit of fun called Fun Facts About Tennessee.
It’s a neat little list of things most of us TN residents don’t know about our fine state. Things like:
Did you know the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Eastern Tennessee is the most visited park in the U.S.?
But it is soooooo much more than just a fun little fact list. It is, in fact, viral marketing. What is viral marketing?
I am so glad you asked. Viral marketing is creating web content–it may be a website, an article, a video, a podcast, etc.–that is so great… so fun/funny, that people can’t help but spread it for you. They post about it on their blog (as we are here) and they email it to friends. In that way, it becomes like a virus, spreading on its own.
The real benefit from doing this, from a small business perspective, is two-fold.
- The brand recognition and buzz-worthy aspects of a much-talked-about piece of marketing. A good example of this is our guerrilla golf balls.
- The links this generates to one’s website are so valuable in terms of search engine rankings that they almost cannot be measured.
So in our Fun Facts example, here is a local realtor who gets it. He has crafted a catchy, useful piece of content and placed it on his site. Now blogs like ours are linking to it, sharing this neat list with friends and customers. He’ll probably get 50-100 links to his site out of this, just as we linked to him at the top of this post. And that boost he gets in the search engines is going to help him sell more houses… I guarantee it. This kind of quality “linkbait” (site content that is “fishing” for links from other sites) can singlehandedly lift a site in the rankings, even when no on-site optimization is being done.
Those links will cause the search engines to see his site as a valuable one–one that other sites see as an authority. A link to a site is a sign of trust. Get enough signs of trust, and your site starts ranking better. A lot better.
Keystone has dabbled for a while in this kind of content creation and viral marketing consulting. And we’re being asked about it more and more. We’d love to talk to you about it, should you have an interest. It can boost your company’s profile in the search engines–and trust me, search engines are only going to become more important to the success of your website.
Let us know if you have an interest in some of our viral marketing ideas. We like being creative, especially when it can dramatically help your business.
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Posted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments
Create Your Own Website Polls With PollDaddy
PollDaddy is a create-your-own website poll service, and we thought we’d take it for a test drive for you.
The core service is free. You can create polls, publish them on your website, and have unlimited responses to them.
If you want to pay $20/month, you can upgrade to a premium package that allows for even more scalability and customization… as well as access to statistics about your poll and the people who took it. (We’re testing out the free version, because we’re cheap and we spent all our money on golf balls).
To give this thing a trial, we decided to ask our audience to help us name our robot.
We recently added a robot to our payroll. He takes care of a lot of the more mundane tasks such as taking out the garbage, cleaning the office, & fixing paper jams in the printer. Oh, he also answers tech questions from our readers in a new online Q&A column over at iSurfSumner.com (Dear Abby for Technology). Right now we’re calling him Arnie the AnswerBot, because we’re not very creative and didn’t want to waste precious time on the robot-naming task.
But we wonder if there isn’t a better name out there for him. Here… before you make up your mind… he looks like this:
Okay, so what does that guy look like to you? A Mike? A Simon? Maybe a Winchester?
Killing two birds with one stone, here is our PollDaddy poll where you can vote to help us name our new robot. Feel free to suggest a name yourself if you don’t like our choices, and vote as often as you like. Take the poll now:
As you can see, the poll is quite slick. It was easy to build and only took about 3 minutes. If you have anything worth letting your readers vote on… head on over to PollDaddy and sign up. Oh, and check back here on our blog to see what kind of name the little robot guy ends up with.
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Common Web Design Mistakes
Building a website and filling it with content can be a difficult process, especially if it’s your first site. We have a lot of clients ask us what they should put on their website. Often this is directly related to what your intended purpose is. Are you trying to sell products? Are you trying to build a community and increase communication with your clients?
Despite the many different functions websites can serve, there are definitely some common design-related mistakes that we see; instances where the layout or look of a website might actually hinder your success. For instance, one of the most common errors is creating a website or page that is too busy, creating information overload in your visitors and maybe driving them away all together.
Check out this handy top-10 list of common web design mistakes. It should give you an excellent frame of reference when considering how your website should look and behave.
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