I had always wondered how it seemed like EVERYONE knew how to create their own website to build their portfolio or for a side project. Well, now I have discovered one of their secrets!

Someone introduced me to a little site called ThemeForest.com, a great compilation of different people’s work that provide customers like you and me (who aren’t so html-savvy) with beautiful, customizable pages.

They are available in easy-to-format designs like WordPress and relatively inexpensive, so you can have the creative freedom without needing the in-depth knowledge to build the website by yourself.

I have explored this site for hours taking a look at the many templates. They are categorized for easy navigation, including creative, corporate, retail, technology, non-profit, entertainment, personal, specialty, or admin pages among others. The pages are able to be previewed and have are user-reviewed.

Here are a couple options I am looking at that for a personal online portfolio:

These are all available at under $10 each. It is tough to choose!

If you were looking for something along these lines (like myself), I hope this gives you a push in the right direction. Happy hunting!

So now that your business has moved into online territory, it is time to get the conversation started with your consumers. Building an online community has great benefits including being able to directly interact with those that use your product or service and creating a real sense of togetherness.

Some members of your community will be self-motivated to share their thoughts through pure love and loyalty to your brand and product, but others may need a little push. According to Richard Millington, the founder of FeverBee Limited, members can be motivated by a few things your company can offer: fame, money and power. Here are tips on how to provide these rewards.

Fame

• Have a hall-of-fame or special mentions for people who achieve something
• Organize competitions to recognize people in your community
• Let loyal members write their own columns or blogs
• Continue to refer achievements by members
• Interview the top members
• Have a member of the week/month
• Hold awards nights
• Have popularity ratings

Money

• Don’t pay members with actual money
• Invite related recruiters to participate in your community
• Encourage members to develop products for the community
• Mention members that have been hired by their work in the community
• Keep a list of members who have been most successful in their work
• Tell you members about job opportunities that may not be advertised
• Let your members arrange events that have entry fees

Power

• Give top members projects and initiatives they can run
• Ask top members for advice on key issues
• Give top members the ability to approve comments/pictures/columns by other members
• Create a list of members who have these power for the rest of the community to see

Use these rewards generously. They cost very little to your company, but provide huge benefits.

Search Engine Optimization: A loaded phrase that floats around the online world, but the ‘how to’ part is like a foreign language to most people. Do you want to figure out how to achieve a higher ranking on search engine results page? Here it is, laid out in 9 simple steps:

1. Brainstorming – write down 20-30 phrases that best describe your business. What products or services are most important and most profitable? Make sure they are suitable for online  sales
2. Search Popularity   – the next step is to see what phrases are the most popular in searches by your potential customers. A great tool to use is Google’s Keyword Popularity Tool
3. Competition – don’t forget to research your competition and see what is working for them
4. Choose keywords – after your research on popular, relevant keywords, it is time to make a decision. The most important phrase should be used for your homepage, while other phrases (10-25 depending on the size of your site) should be chosen for the remainder of your website
5. Site Structure – the best case scenario would be that you are building your website and incorporating SEO site from the beginning. Each important phrase should have a separate website page. For instance, if you are a site promoting soccer services, one page should be devoted to each of your services. Eg. Soccer camp, soccer conditioning, and soccer apparel should each have their own page
6. Domain & URLS – your important phrases should be placed in the URL of each page. Eg. ‘Soccer Camp’ should appear in the beginning of your URL with no words preceding it
7. HTML tags – on top of your domain and URLs, the keywords should be placed in the title tag, alt tags, image title, meta description tag, keyword meta tag, H1/H2, and strong tags for greater searchability
8. Keyword density – the important phrase should be mentioned several times on the page of the site. This includes the text heading, text subheading, copy, and internal links.
9. Link building – Finally, the last step of SEO is to increase links to your page. This could be done by building great content, submitting your site to search engines like Google and Yahoo/MSN, exchanging links with relevant sites in industry, becoming a member of various relevant associations or advertising on other sites.

I hope that these steps helped to demystify the world of search engine optimization for you. Enjoy those extra views and clicks!

Since most of my posts have been about what I have observed, I thought I’d switch it up today and share something I have learned. Now back to the question:

Do you have an e-marketing strategy?

If you answered ‘no,’ then today is your lucky day! I am going to blow your mind with six steps to crafting a digital marketing strategy. You might ask, ‘why do I even need one?’ Well, let me ask you this: Would you put up a billboard in an area no one drives in? Would you sell good old traditional bread in a gluten-free store?  Would you promote water-wings to the Canadian Olympic swim team?

Probably not. So why would you spend thousands to create a beautiful site and have no one visit?

Having an e-marketing strategy can help you increase your online presence to your target market and ultimately increase profits. So let’s get down to it with six steps to help you get started:

1)      Context – the first step is to examine the context of your organization. Be clear about who you are, what your identity is, and what makes you valuable. You also need to find out who your customers are and what they want. Doing research on competitors, both direct and indirect, is helpful seeing the broader scope of the industry. Finally, figure out the social, political, and economic factors and the likelihood of change in the future.

2)      Objectives – keep in mind that your online marketing goals should be in line with your brand’s greater strategic objectives. These goals need to be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound.

3)      Value-Exchange – In this phase, you need to determine what value you are adding to the market. This is also the stage to take a look at other goals that support your main objectives. Exploring all options before focusing on a direction will result in a more successful path.

4)      Tactics and Evaluation – With your SMART objectives in mind, you can choose from a variety of tools and tactics to help you. Here are some popular tactics used: email marketing, online advertising, affiliate marketing, SEO, PPC, Social Media, ORM, and WebPR.

5)      Metrics – digital marketing should start with ROI in mind. Setting up analysis and measurement tools in conjunction with the value-exchange stage will help measure returns from the beginning. Depending on your goals, you could use Click through rate (CTR), Cost per click (CPC), or Cost per Acquisition (CPA) as some of your measuring tools

6)      Ongoing Optimization – the last step is misleading because it is not a last step at all! Since your organization and the online world is a dynamic space, continuous refining and adjusting needs to take place for your business to stay relevant and successful

Now it’s your turn. Get on it!

I’m a foodie at heart. There is little else that makes me happier than pictures of rich, delicious food with step-by-step direction of how I can make it appear in front of me.

Naturally, my favourite online sites are food blogs and I am often searching for new recipes and inspiration. One day I made an amazing discover: Food blogs of compiled food blogs. It was life-changing! There is row upon row of food in seemingly never-ending pages.

My favourites are foodgawker.com

punchfork.com

and tastespotting.com

Food bloggers form quite a tight-knit community and often reference each other in their own blogs (with the majority never ever meeting each other face to face!). For instance, a well-known food blogger’s husband died last fall and she dedicated a peanut butter chocolate pie, his favourite dessert, blog to him. Before I knew it, the majority of food blogs I viewed that week were chocolate peanut butter pies or variations of it all dedicated to this food blogger to offer their condolences and support.

So how is this related to eMarketing?

Some companies have started to advertise on these food blogging sites. By putting up ads on sites that a particular niche consumer visits, businesses are able to target an individual that would be interested in their product. Perhaps your company sells a particular knife set whose sales would benefit from putting your product in front of those eyes. Or perhaps you could endorse an influential food blogger by giving her a set.

Here is the point: targeting sites your consumers visit is the most effective use of advertising dollars. Whether you sell premium whisky or energy conserving light bulbs, do not just throw ads up everywhere, but dig deep and discover where your niche customer goes. It may not be enough to place that light bulb ad in a general hardware site, but go a step further to place it on a site that provides environmentally friendly, cost-saving tips around the home. Be focused!

Back in the day, there was only one relevant letter in the marketing mix: P. To be more specific, there were four Ps – price, promotion, place, and product. With the uprising of the web age, however, there is another letter we marketing professionals now need to acknowledge: C. And guess what? There are 4 of them to match the original Ps.

The Product P it is now swapped with this C – Customer’s needs and wants. Similarly, Price is now replaced with Cost, Place with Customer Convenience, and Promotion with Communications with company.

Let me explain this in a little more detail.

The Four C’s present a consumer-focused model through the help of the web. The internet enables the shift from mass marketing to niche marketing. The first C focuses on Customer’s needs. When creating your Product, focus on satisfying your targeted consumer’s wants. Cost includes not only your customer’s cost, but the cost to change to a new product and the cost for not selecting a competitor’s product or service. The internet allows consumers to buy an online product from almost anywhere in the world, making Customer Convenience an important factor. This C should take into account how easily a consumer finds the product, finds information on the product, and buys the product (among other factors).  Finally, the Communication C presents a broader focus than promotion and includes any form of communication between the organization and customer. With online reviews and the anonymity of the web, businesses and product reviews are easily shared and often heavily relied on.

By focusing on a very specific group, your business will be able to tailor a product to meet each and every need of that niche consumer. Remember, it’s all about the consumer!

This week has been all about learning ways to improve a website from essential features to usability to facts on how people view sites. Let me share some of my newfound knowledge (in no particular order):

• People start viewing on the top left corner of the page and work their way across and down
• Clean, easy navigation is key
• Ads that are placed on the left or top part of the site receive the most views
• Keep advertisements prominently placed but far enough out of the way that visitors can use the site without being swarmed
• Make your site layout compatible with all types of screens such as mobile, tablet, or desktop
• By the time people hit the lower parts of your site, they are only scanning
• Headlines draw attention, but fancy fonts do not
• Pictures that are bigger catch viewers’ eye more than small ones
• Ads inside or below a great piece of content get more views
• Navigation bars and menus should be placed on the top part of the site
• Use contrast to make your site more readable and accessible to visitors and to direct reader’s attention to where you want it to go
• Lists are better than large chunks of text and paragraphs
• Avoid confusion by having a clear message. The site’s objective should be obvious
• Avoid drop-down menus because they are inaccessible to touch devices
• Banners are ignored
• Take away distractions – animation, audio ads, pop up ads – or at least keep them to a minimum

Have fun making your website the best it can be!

Over the past week, our class has been focused on many of the tools we can use for online research. Sifting through many sites such as www.MarketingCharts.com for research trends to www.Alexa.com for traffic rank estimates to www.CheckPageRank.net to check your site’s Page Rank by Google, I have found one of my favourites for new ideas and trend, Trend Hunter (www.trendhunter.com). With over 37,000,000 monthly views, there is no doubt that this is an immensely popular site.

Here there is a large source of inspiration for almost everything. Separated by category, Trend Hunter has a section for every trend from culture to tech to lifestyle. Here the team at Trend Hunter seeks out content of new trends discovered by their global network and posts the best insights, ideas and findings throughout the day.

This great space is one of the only I can think of where there are galleries of underwater dog photography, social goods like these Fair Trade Peruvian Handcrafts,

and Eco-friendly Killer Whale Vessels,

all just one click away!

What does this mean for you or your business?

This site makes seeking out the hottest trends effortless.This makes staying ahead of the crowd  easy, and perhaps you will be inspired by the newest innovations on the way. Maybe your company is similar to one featured on the site and their discoveries can help you cut costs or make your product stand out. Or even better, perhaps you are featured on the site and it draws huge amounts of traffic to your site!

Happy Chocolate/Flowers/Gifts/Love Day from one of the greatest influences of the web in our time!

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