JBCR Virtual Solutions Blog

Archive for March, 2007

When you build a blog you are on the right road to pro­mot­ing you, your web site, your ser­vices, your prod­ucts, etc. But just cre­at­ing a blog is not enough.

First Step
It is becom­ing increas­ingly more impor­tant that your blog is cus­tomized, not just a tem­plate that you can use, but cus­tomized to show you and your mes­sage. See some exam­ples here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/portfolio.html#Blog

Sec­ond Step
Post often! Your post doesn’t have to be long, in fact you can, and should, send your read­ers back to your site to read more on the topic. Not only that but your site will have more var­ied and use­ful infor­ma­tion that will ben­e­fit your readers.

Third Step
Reg­is­ter your blog with as many blog direc­to­ries as pos­si­ble. Most of your read­ers will come through these direc­to­ries (though they will come through search engines as well).

Fourth Step
Ping every­time you have updated a post. One of the ser­vices I use is: www.pingomatic.com

Happy Blog­ging!

Jan

In my busi­ness I talk to many clients about dif­fer­ent aspects of mar­ket­ing. They also ask me about all sorts of dif­fer­ent mar­ket­ing strate­gies they have read about, heard about, or been advised to do, in one form or another.

We all know the say­ing “All is fair in love and war”, well that seems to be true in mar­ket­ing as well. It seems to me the more I hear the more I real­ize that ‘many’ mar­keters actu­ally don’t care too much about the client nor do they care about the client’s cus­tomers. They are only try­ing to mar­ket their ‘line’.

Exam­ples:

* Font type (Ariel ver­sus Ver­dana) can make or break a sale

* Price (9.99 ver­sus 9.97) can make or break a sale

* Bold the first sen­tence of every para­graph or bold the first sen­tence of every other para­graph (which one can make or break a sale)

Read more of this arti­cle here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Fair

Jan

Mar­ket­ing In Sec­ond Life — Yes It Is Hap­pen­ing And We Are There!

Sec­ond Life is grow­ing as a very unique area for not only meet­ing peo­ple but also for mar­ket­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices. There are stores, malls, bill­boards mar­ket­ing prod­ucts, such as cloth­ing, with com­pany logos and infor­ma­tion that can given away or sold as pro­mo­tional material.

Who will be involved in mar­ket­ing pro­mo­tions? Of course cloth­ing man­u­fac­tures, but also artists (visual and musi­cal) as well as com­pa­nies and schools from all sorts of dif­fer­ent areas of online companies.

We have started our Sec­ond Life mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Come see our visual exam­ples here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/marketing.html#Second

Want to join Sec­ond Life? Click here and do look me up when you get there!

Google is going through another algo­rithm change right now. It’s pro­pogat­ing across the dat­a­cen­ters, and for the last week it has been going up and down. From what I can see it isn’t set­tled, so don’t panic — yet.

Jan

I was read­ing an arti­cle that said that you have about 10 sec­onds to catch a vis­i­tors atten­tion before they leave your web site. That is less than what I read pre­vi­ously and more than some arti­cles state. So what can you do in a such a short period of time to keep folks on your site and hope­fully purchasing.

1. Present a qual­ity web site. If you want peo­ple to buy a ‘qual­ity prod­uct’ then make sure your web site looks ‘qual­ity’ as well.

2. Ensure the load time of your web site is quick. Flash may look ‘cool’ but load time is a prob­lem. Keep images to a min­i­mum, or at least ensure they are opti­mized so load­ing time is less. Flash­ing arrows, audio that comes on when vis­i­tors land on the page, etc., do not help load­ing or keep the cus­tomer stay longer.

3. Easy nav­i­ga­tion is crit­i­cal for cus­tomers. If they can’t find what they are look­ing for, quickly, they will go some place else. Have top nav­i­ga­tion, con­densed bot­tom nav­i­ga­tion and impor­tant links to inner pages from your home page.

4. If you really want long copy on your web page have the most impor­tant copy ‘above the fold’. If your head­ing takes up all the space in your screen trust me your vis­i­tor won’t even take the time to read any­thing more. Space text to add readability

Think of what you would like to find in your shop­ping expe­ri­ence and give it to your vis­i­tor / customer!

Jan