To do this, you must make sure you have appropriate keywords in the title on your home page.
The page should be constructed to attract search phrases your potential customer might use.
These phrases should also be worked in to your promotional copy to get the search engines’ attention, yet at the same time make sense to a visitor.
For instance, if you paint houses for a living, your main key phrase would be (your city or town here) and “house painter”.
This is most likely one of the phrases people will use when searching for a house painter.
One other simple, but effective tip in this case is to use the phrase as a single word – housepainter.
You can also work in the plural version, house painters.
Now is not the time to judge or criticize, now is the time to attract those searchers.
However, don’t limit your thinking to this phrase only.
Put yourself in the searcher’s mind.
How might they find you?
Not everyone thinks alike, so take some time to create a list of potential phrases someone needing their house painted might use.
Here are some words you could add to your master tag of “house painter”.
Professional
Interior
Exterior
Find a
Looking for a
Local
Best
Recommended
Residential
Avoid phrases such as “First Class”, or “Top Notch”.
These are advertising phrases not search enquiries.
Or how about some other inquiries people may try such as:
Painting Service
Contractor
Estimate
Pricing
These are just a few of many terms you should be incorporating into you web site.
Remember – try to think like your potential customer.
So all you painters, plumbers, electricians, landscapers, pool installers, restaurants, bakeries beauty salons, and many many others, start re-working your web pages.
By the way, if you are wondering how I came up with the different keyword suggestions, email me and I would be happy to talk to you.
Here is one quick, but efficient strategy that you can implement quickly, and at minimal cost, as a matter of fact, it will only cost you your time to get more of traffic to your site right now!
Write articles of interest for your industry.
This is an amazingly effective tool for driving traffic.
Well-written, information rich articles can bring a lot of eyeballs to your web site.
Don’t forget to add your contact information, including your URL and email address yo your byline.
Articles should be approximately 500 words in length.
These directories are continually searched by bloggers, and web masters who are always on the lookout for additional well written, non promotional material to add to their, or their client’s web sites.
The process is that they can copy and paste your article to their site, or blog, with certain rules.
1. They must post the article exactly as written, no editing allowed.
2. They must include your contact info at the end of the article. They are not allowed to imply that they wrote the piece themselves.
This not only generates back links to your site, but if your article becomes popular, and goes viral, it can ramp up traffic to your site quite effectively.
Just make sure your content is well written, and full of useful information. Do not attempt to sell yourself or promote your company in the article. Doing so will guarantee no one will use it. Simply add a tag line, author’s bio and link to your site in the closing paragraph.
One of the best places to start is here:
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
If you need any help in getting the creative juices flowing, call or email me, and we would be happy to help.
This may sound counterintuitive, but the very best way to create and structure your presentation is to start with a paper outline or storyboard.
The first step is to create a preliminary layout of what you want to say. Think of your slides as chapters in a book. First, create your Book Title, which will be the theme of your presentation.
Next comes the chapter titles, and from there add a maximum of three talking points as sub titles. Continue adding slides in this manner, Title and 3 talking points max.
Once you have determined the information, add a pencil sketch of the imagery, if necessary, you feel will work best to compliment your words. Review your storyboard, revising content, changing the slide order, swapping out images until you are happy with the flow. It is only after this stage where you would actually fire up your PowerPoint program.
This is the basic procedure we use for our clients all the time. Ask any professional graphic designer, and they will tell you the same thing, that rough sketches or storyboards are the only way to begin. Changing a scribbled line of text or photo idea on a piece of paper involves about 10% of the time it would take to make those changes in PowerPoint.
What makes a video go viral? There is no set formula, but there are usually certain characteristics that seem to be common to most of the popular videos. I’m eliminating stupid pet tricks, and skateboard accidents, and focusing on the corporate, commercial brand of videos. First rule of viral videos – you cannot force a video to take off, it simply happens on it’s own. People must see the video, like what they see, and tell their friends about it. One recent video that has great success is titled “Pink Glove Dance”. It is a wonderfully produced video promoting breast cancer awareness.
So, why did this video generate 6.8 million plus views? That’s right, 6.8 million views!
First, it is fun to watch. It’s everyday people having fun, and for some, looking very uncomfortable attempting to dance, but “performing” for a good cause. The video will have your head nodding to the music in your chair as you watch. It’s soft sell, there is no corporate spokesperson begging for money, there is a simple title at the beginning, and a quick graphic at the end. Lastly, the “scenes” have obviously been story boarded and filmed by someone who planned out and composed each shot in his/her mind, if not with a paper storyboard, at least with some sort of script for the actors to follow. It is a fun video to watch, and you will want to immediately want to share with your friends. You can never forcefully make a viral video, but if you follow the guidelines of this video, you will have much better chance of getting your message out to a huge audience. Pink Glove Dance
As the Vancouver Winter Olympics are finally here, we are thrilled to have done our small part in helping the LCBO with their Go Canada! promotion currently running on their Website.
Cattails was honoured to create LCBO’s animated product carousel system that can be seen at lcbo.com. For the techies out there, it’s main features include dynamic image and database loading, automated animations and interactive controls.
Now this may look like a flash animation but in fact is based on a new, cutting edge standard, the JavaScript (JQuery) framework library. The main advantage of this technology is that it does not require the Adobe Flash plugin to be installed in your browser. This should make Steve Jobs quite happy as it plays on the iPhone, iPod Touch and the soon to be released iPad!
Here at Cattails, we can’t wait for the games to begin, and we just know Canadians will ”Own the Podium” with our prediction of over 30 medals coming our way. A big jump from 8 last time out.
Be sure to enjoy a cold frosty Canadian made beverage from your local LCBO while watching our Canadian athletes take home the gold.
When selling a product or service, here is the one question you must answer for your visitor every time. So? Leading to the comment “Ah, (I get it)”. A simple two letter word with huge implications. When you properly answer the question “So?” you will be appealing to your visitor’s emotions, not their logic. You will be promoting your product or service’s benefits, not the features, and that is what moves product in a big way.
“Each tablet contains 5 industry patented ingredients engineered for pain relief” So? “You are pain free in 10 minutes.” Ah.
“Our dishwasher offers state of the art noise reduction.” So?
“You can watch TV while it is running without having to turn up the volume.” Ah.
“Our expert team of designers create high quality PowerPoint shows for you.” So?
“Farming out the project to us will guarantee you stand out from your colleagues at the next sales meeting.” Ah.
Remember, people aren’t looking for drills, they’re looking for perfect holes. Sell them on their emotions first. Benefits sell, features justify the decision.
Many times we have clients come to us with existing PowerPoint decks, and ask us to pretty them up, “make them sizzle”. We are happy to do so, but when we present our suggestions to them, they are usually shocked to see we have sometimes doubled the number of slides.
Once they have calmed down, and started breathing normally again, they realize that we have not added any content, we have simply restructured the information into more manageable bites.
Psychologically, when people see too much information crammed on to a slide, they actually turn off. The mind says there is too much here, I’m not going to try and figure it out, so I’ll just ignore it. Proper context with minimal words, and effective imagery offers the greatest clarity, and message retention.
This may sound counterintuitive, but the very best way to create and structure your presentation is to start with a paper outline or storyboard.
