Watch out…I might forget the words as I’m type-synching…

I was going to let DW Web take the weekend off, but I’m happy to say Brown Baron gave me a reason to go ahead and post! I’m very honored to have been awarded one of the Breakout Blogger Awards. I was just as happy to get the chance to tip my hat to my very own favorite breakouts blog stars! This award was launched by Bob of Bobbarama.com to celebrate his blog’s first year anniversary.

Bob’s official description of the award:

This award casts a spotlight on bloggers who are just beginning to draw lotsa attention — the equivalent of a song with a bullet on Billboard’s Top 100 chart. Lotsa good posts. Lotsa good buzz. These bloggers are going places in a hurry.

So of course, I was really happy that Brown thought of me and would definitely have included Brown Baron in my list…but you already got one

So without further ado. I now give you my picks for the Break Out Blogger Award:

to YC at Internet Marketing Mind, Ad Tracker from Ad Tracker (what is your name Ad?) and Kate Hook with her very new blog Cheesy Marketing Ramblings.

YC is truly my internet marketing guru. The blogger known as Ad has won me over with her great posts with very tricky digg/link baiting titles. And Kate’s blog is new on the scene, but can that chick write!

Congratulations everyone! Beware the paparazzi when you leave your house in the morning

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 You know you’ve been there. You have to get a project started. You’re got all the details on the structure and functionality you need. But you sit down and every bit of creative juice that was ever in you has evaporated.

You go online and start surfing around. You open up magazines and books. And still, nothing.

I find myself in this situation more often than I’d like to admit. I’ve found one trick that has never let me down. So what do I do?

I go outside!

When you work and socialize and practically live online, it’s easy to dismiss the thought that anything offline could be a worthwhile source of inspiration. But in my experience, nothing could be farther from the truth.

There are more color combination and different shapes and patterns in nature than any designer could ever dream up.  It doesn’t matter if it’s sunny or cloudy, hot or cold, rainy or sunny or if you’re in the city or the country, just relax and look up and around you.

Even if you don’t think you’ll be inspired by the great outdoors, if you’re really stumped, a break and a brisk walk will probably do you some good anyway

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se·man·tics The meaning or the interpretation of a word, sentence, or other language form: We’re basically agreed; let’s not quibble over semantics.

I’m always quick to pull out the old “semantics” argument with friends and family. But when it comes to website design and online marketing semantics are huge! You know what your business is and the words you use to describe it. But you’re already visiting your site, you need to find out the words that people searching the internet use to find businesses in your industry.

This issue came to the forefront of my mind this afternoon when I stumbled upon a site called Geoff’s Google Duel. This site is basically just an application that allows you to compare the number of results for two different keywords or keyword phrases. Just out of curiosity I entered “web design” vs. “website design.” Here are the results:

Now what stands out to me immediately looking at those numbers is that I should definitely be actively targeting “website design” as the competition is far less than “web design.” And it might be a more realistic shorter term search engine goal. If you have a young or newly redesigned site, reaching the top 100 for “web design” could really be an impossible dream, but with a lot of hard work and active marketing, it could be a possibility for “website design” or at least not bring quite as loud of snorts and smirks from the pros as reaching the top of “web design!”

Keep in mind though…that there are other things to take into account. There is probably a reason those numbers are so lopsided. The number of searches for “web design” is probably higher, right?

A quick search on Wordtracker shows that the daily prediction for number of searches is as follows:

• “website design” - 2,030 searches per day
• “web design” - 6,291 searches per day

From a purely free, organic search engine optimization point of view, I for one, would not snub my nose at over 2,000 searches a day. So you might notice me substituting “website design” for “web design” here and there.

After all, it’s just semantics!

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So you’re ready to take your small business online.  Like any good consumer, you begin your research and all of a sudden find yourself in an entirely new world of acronyms, theories and strategies.  There are so many distractions that anyone can easily get off track and start to feel a bit like a deer in the headlights!

Far too often, this can either discourage small business owners from getting a website or can distract them so much that they are almost terrified to put up a site that isn’t good enough, so the website is either put on indefinite hold or the idea is buried completely.

Sure, there are basic rules that should be followed.  However, online business is an ever-growing ocean of theories and case studies and waiting to jump in because you’re afraid to miss something, is just not feasible for anyone!

While I think it’s important to learn as much as you can and if appropriate, hire a web designer who’s on top of the latest online trends as well as the time tested website design methods, the most important thing is to not lose focus of the ultimate goal.

Most small businesses first and foremost, want to make sure they have a basic website for their current customers and prospects can visit to learn more about their products or services and make contact.

All other considerations should be both secondary and ongoing!

-Keep an eye out, I’m working on a Web to Human glossary of all of those terms and acronyms! 

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Traffic Rank for Dwwebsolutions.com:

Alexa traffic rank based on a combined measure of page views and users (reach)

Yesterday	1 wk. Avg.	3 mos. Avg.	3 mos. Change
N/A*	153,455	991,631	6,940,2544

Those numbers are kind of unbelievable to me as this is truly the fruits of about 7 or 8 days of dedicated blogging!  Note the traffic numbers for September which are substantially larger than the previous four months and we’re only at Sept. 8th! 

I have had this blog going for over a year. Unfortunately, I had kind of let is slide over the first 6 months or so of this year. At the end of August, I decided to rededicate myself to blogging in general.

I have never had a lot of traffic coming into this site. Which was overall not that unexpected or problematic, as a very specific service business who was not focusing much on the traffic aspect, I was pretty happy when I could land 50 new visitors a week. I never even bothered to check the Alexa rank or many other stats programs for it because as I said, that really wasn’t my focus.

But as I’ve been significantly increasing my efficiency in actually designing my client’s websites, I’ve had a lot more time on my hands for other marketing methods. I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I’ve seen what blogging has done to help my client’s sites in terms of the search engines too.

What Did I Do?

• Write!  I consistently wrote at least one post a day, sometimes two.  By far the most popular post was 60+ Resources for New Bloggers   And let me tell you, that took some time to find all the resources, but it took exactly zero creativity…I’m not necessarily proud of that, but that seems to be the way blogging works.  And even if no one else had looked at that post, I learned a lot gathering the information and continue to reference it on an almost daily basis.
• Don’t Be Scared, Get Out There  Everybody talks about it, but I really believe it now…the key to blogging is to connect with other bloggers.  Not only does it help in the cold world of getting incoming links (yes, it’s questionable based on whether people do-follow or no-follows).  But more importantly, the blogosphere is full of amazingly talented and helpful people…not to mention, really fun people too!  So get out there and read as much as you can and interact!  See below for those who have helped me in my one week transformation.
• Social Networking, Social Networking, Social Networking  Again, this is nothing new.  But I have to put my two cents in that this is a huge, huge factor in what’s been happening around here.  I feel compelled to say it mainly because I read a lot about StumbleUpon, Digg, MyBlogLog, Technorati and all the others before and thought that’s nice, but it would never apply or work for me.  WRONG!  StumbleUpon specifically has been amazing for me.  I know different sites have different results with the different social sites.  But in my case, SU has become a really great marketing tool, fun addiction and great place to connect with some really wonderful bloggers!  I’m such a huge fan that I actually wrote a post earlier this week just pointing to a few great posts about SU from the week.   Definitely check out the articles mentioned in that post for all the information you could possibly want about StumbleUpon.  Or you can always add me as an SU friend and I’d be happy to help anyway I can!

So you can see, I really didn’t do any earth shattering…just implemented what all of the best have been recommending forever.  But what amazes me is that you don’t have to be a professional blogger or blogging expert to be able to get the results from any of these techniques.  All you have to be is determined and sleep deprived!

Only time will tell whether this new endeavor will have any real ROI in terms of my website design business, but I’ve already had several referrals from it…so my prediction would be definitely!

As I mentioned above, I have discovered a lot of great blogs and bloggers and online friends in general in the last two weeks or so.  Here are a few…check out their stuff and subscribe to their feeds.  They’re brilliant and even better eager to help!

• Jayne at About Blogging
• Sara at the Blog Experiment
  
• Sus at AdScoops
• Blog About Your Blog
• Chris G On New Media
• Internet Marketing Online with Shaun Low

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One of the first things anyone will tell you when you venture into the world of blogging is to get traffic and build readership you have to be active in the blogosphere. No successful blog is an island. The key to blogging is community.

But as I sit here this morning I’m at a loss. After reading through my feeds and commenting where I could, stumbling around my friends and my favorite keywords for a few hours and doing the same, I’m left with a bit of an “all dressed up and nowhere to go” feeling!

I run into this from time to time. In my experience, active blogging can be a lot like summer in Kansas…8 inches of rain and massive, overwhelming flooding one week followed by a month long drought soon after!

So I thought I’d put it out here…this is what I’ve been using discover new blogs and new blog friends…

• My BlogLog -dwoffice
• StumbleUpon - dwweb
• Technorati -dwoffice
• Exploring the blogrolls and commenters on my current favorite blogs
• Digg…although, I have to admit it’s not my favorite or maybe I just don’t get how to use it efficiently!
• Bloglines…I use this as my feed reader and have also used it to search for new feeds.

How do you discover new blogs? How did you get here? Any suggestions or even criticisms of what I’m already doing are welcome…I’m even open to gratuitous comment requests and self promoting namedropping and befriending on any networks!

Help me help you help me…or something like that

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Here’s the thing…

You want to comment on blog posts that you think are great. You feel like it is appropriate to start out by acknowledging the greatness of the post. You have officially said “Great post!” 1,000 times this week.

Why not try something a little (or a lot) different? Come on, stand out from the crowd!

All of the following have at one time or another been used as synonyms for “Great.”  So pick one and fill in the blank “_____ post!”

• Admirable
• Amazing
• Awe-inspiring
• Awesome…Totally Awesome
• Bad
• Bodacious
• Brilliant
• Choice
• Cool
• Divine
• Dope
• Dynamite
• Enjoyable
• Excellent
• Exquisite
• Fab
• Fabulous
• Fantastic
• Far out
• Fetch … thank you Mean Girls
• Fierce
• Fine
• First-rate
• Fly…also including Super Fly
• Fresh
• Glorious
• Gnarly
• Groovy
• Ill
• Impressive
• Jiggy
• Killer
• Major- thank you Posh
• Marvelous
• Mega
• Off the hook…this includes all other forms including off the chain, off the hizzy…you know, all those.
• Outstanding
• Peachy
• Phat
• Phenomenal
• Primo
• Rad
• Radical
• Remarkable
• Sick
• Slammin
• Spiffy
• Splendid
• Standout
• Stellar
• Stupendous
• Sublime
• Super
• Super duper
• Superb
• Superior
• Sweet
• Swell
• Terrific
• Tremendous
• Tubular
• Wicked
• Wonderful

Feel free to use any of the above or add your own in comments…

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You put so much effort into designing your business’ website whether you do it yourself or hire a design firm to do the job. There’s picking color schemes, images, writing and rewriting copy, choosing domain names and web hosts and a thousand other things that go into creating the perfect website.

With so many things to consider, all too often the simplest things can be overlooked. So what is the worst mistake you can possibly make when designing your site? Drumroll please…

Not designing for your target audience!

What do I mean?

Your website is not your business, it is a representation of your business. All the pretty pictures and flashy menus and bells and whistles in the world don’t mean a darn thing if your visitors don’t feel comfortable enough to make the transition from visitor to customer.

What is all too often overlooked in the website design process is a website visitor’s visceral reaction when arriving at your homepage. I know I’ve been guilty of this in the past. You can get so caught up in having a professional looking, slick site that make people say ‘Wow, they’re big time!’ that you can forget that your website is your voice online. If your website is too “big time” with an overly upscale feel, that online voice can sound pretty patronizing to your small business clients.

The problem is people are human, and when we are going to trust people and work with them, we need to identify with them and feel a connection on some level. We want to feel that our potential business partner understands us and our business.

Let me give you an example…

When I was a kid, my father was the president of a wholesale hardware company. Basically, his company supplied the inventory for a large number of the hardware stores on Main Streets of tiny towns across Kansas and the Midwest.

Now, part of my Dad’s contract was always having a company car. The car allowances that he and the salesmen had would have been more than enough to have provided for a nice, big Cadillacs or Lincolns for him and the rest of the team. So what did my Dad and the sales team drive?

They all rolled in Ford Crown Victoria’s. Those cars were fully loaded, but on the outside, they were the same cars that most of the state government employees around KS drove. With all the options, pricewise they were definitely comparable to the Caddies and the Towncars. So why didn’t they spring for those?

IMAGE!

John and Mary at Joe’s Hardware in Smalltown, KS don’t feel comfortable dealing with the slick looking guy with a fancy suit rolling up to their store in an easily recognizable luxury vehicle. On the other hand, they welcome with open arms their friend Frank who shows up in his Ford to check up on them and the store.

It was hard for me as a preppy, valley girl wannabe girl of the 80’s to understand why we couldn’t have the “cool” car, but in retrospect, it taught me a lesson that I’ve applied to my business life ever since.

Know your audience.

You don’t have to compromise the quality of your website, just modify the packaging to best fit the people you’re trying to reach!

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It just occurred to me that though I have written a lot on the topic of article marketing on my virtual assistant blog, I haven’t touched on it a lot over here. And since it is a website promotion service we offer, I might give a little background info. or the W’s (who, what, where and why) of article marketing.

As I see it, there can be many benefits to using articles to promote your site. Two always rise to the top of the list in my mind:

1. Well-written, informative articles can help establish you as an expert in your field.
2. In the all powerful eyes of Google, Yahoo and the rest of the bunch, links coming into your site from relevant sites are, if not the Holy Grail, pretty dang important! It’s basically the same as number one but with computers instead of people. The search engines see links to your site as recommendations or votes for your website. So the more links you have coming into your site from other sites that are in related fields, the higher your search engine rankings will eventually get.

So how does writing an article get other people to link to your site?

Well, for one, always display your article on your own website or blog. When people run across it or find it by searching, they might just link to your site to refer their clients or readers there. But most importantly, when writing articles for the purpose of website marketing, you must submit your articles to article directories.

Article directories are just what they sound like. They are like giant filing cabinets full of articles that people have submitted. When you submit an article to a directory, you are giving permission to the directory and anyone else who might come across your article to reprint your article. This is where the links come in.

All directories(or at least all the directories that you submit to) allow you to include an author resource box, basically an “About the Author” section that gives a brief bio about you and a certain number of links (typically 3 or less) to your website or relevant sites you are associated with in some way. Webmasters are always looking for great content to put on their websites and blogs, and this way any time they use your article, they’ll be linking to your site.

So where do you submit your articles?

There are lots of services that offer article submission. Also, many virtual assistants offer that service too. In the past, I have used Article Marketer. If you’re really not wanting to spend the time to submit them yourself, you can certainly use on of these services. Personally, I stopped using them and submit articles manually these days both for myself and my clients. I like to have control over where the articles are going, and I like to have the option of changing up the resource boxes when I submit to different places. That allows me to track which ones work best and tweak them.

I’ve often found that submitting to a few of my favorite standby article directories can be just as effective as when I used a service to submit to hundreds.

A few of my favorite article directories that I always submit to first are:

• Ezine Articles
• Go Articles
• Article Dashboard
• Article Alley

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of them…if you have more, feel free to add to this list in comments.

Well, I could literally go on for several hours about the ins and outs of article marketing and preaching the Gospel of content and links. But I think that’s it for this post. Now that I’ve realized that I am seriously lacking in my article marketing blogging though…keep an eye out for more article marketing posts for the all-important How, that you might have noticed I left out of this one!

Please feel free to leave your thoughts, links to other article directories, questions or advice for fellow article marketers in the comments section below. Where do you submit articles? Have you found articles to be a beneficial marketing tool?

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“As a matter of principle, I never attend the first annual anything.” - George Carlin

As an entrepreneur, one of the toughest roadblocks you run into when first starting out is building your reputation. Whether you are in a service industry or selling your own new product line, how do you persuade prospects to become clients? At times, it can seem like an impossible task, but take heart, there are things you can do.

My first piece of advice for any new business owner is use the people you know! Whether it’s friends, family, past employers or neighbors, make sure everyone you know (and everyone they know for that matter) is in the loop about your new business venture. I would suggest sending out an e-mail to everyone on your contacts list giving them a breakdown of what you’re doing and asking them to pass it along to anyone they know who might be interested in your service or product. You’d be amazed how fast your contact list can multiply by just asking the people you know to pass your information along.

You can even include a special Family and Friends offer or discount. Remember, it takes a lot of work and money to get your business off the ground. Even if you only break even or lose a bit of money on these sales, the portfolio and/or great references or testimonials you gain will be priceless in the future of your business!

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