Online Friendly

23Aug

7 Questions to Discover Content For Your Website

Posted in Website Content, Website Marketing

In our previous post, we introduced you to the concept of regular ‘website updates’. As we explained, when you frequently change your home page, you tell your visitors that you are an active company.

In addition, you show them the value that you give to the communications you have with your clients and potential clients.

Your Update Checklist

When companies ask our president Brent Kobayashi about ways to create content for their sites, he usually draws a quick checklist.

As he explains, this list helps our clients to understand the multiple options they have to easily find new and useful material for their sites. Here are some of them:

1. Has your company done anything new or interesting recently? This can be things such as finishing a larger job, gaining a new client, hiring a new person, or sponsoring a charity.

2. Will your company be attending any events such as a tradeshow in the near future?

3. Are there any new products on the market that your company is using or selling?

4. Are there any trends or news in the general industry that your company is in?

5. Is there anything happening seasonally or periodically that a visitor should be aware of? This can be things such as tax deadlines, or checking your furnace in the fall

6. Are there questions that you frequently answer for your clients?

7. Is there anything that you wish all your clients knew?

If the answer to any of the questions is yes, congratulations you have an update for your website.

In other words, you have a way to let your clients and potential clients see that:

- You are current
- You communicate well
- You are ready for their business

And if you would like to know more about how to discover content and change your home page, feel free to contact us at our Toronto office.

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11Aug

1 (Big) Step to Legitimize Your Small Business on the Web

Posted in Website Content, Website Marketing

When was the last time anything on your home page changed? As you probably already know, your home page is the most important page of your site.

Your homepage is the first impression that your clients get of you and your business. Changing it frequently tells your visitors that you are an active company. It will tell them the value that you give to your site and how you see your business.

Keep in mind that your website may be the most frequently viewed image of your business.

In this first article, we introduce you to the concept of web updates. In future entries, we will give you some questions to discover content for your website, what search engines think of web updates (they like them!), ways to regularly update your site, and the importance of having a social site.

Recently, I spoke with our president Brent Kobayashi about the concept of ‘updating a web site’. At Kobayashi Technology, we encourage our clients to update their homepages frequently.

I asked Brent to define the expression ‘web updates’ for this blog post.

“Web updates are news and information as it relates to the company, and the industry the company is in. The content a small business should create to update their website does not need to be extensive, but it should be relevant to their target audiences.”

Brent believes that updating a website is very important, especially for a small business. According to him, it helps re-enforce the legitimacy of the company.

“One of the main battles for any small business is legitimacy. Current dynamic content on a website home page is possibly the most effective way to show that a business is actively engaged as a business.”

How Often You Should Update

“Once per month is good. However, once per week is great” Brent says. “Once per week shouts to the world that your business is responsive, current, and has its processes in good order”.

At the same time, updating requires planning and maintenance because, as he says, “the only downside to regular updates is the need to keep it up”. To help with this, Brent recommends creating a marketing calendar and a few months’ worth of updates.

“If you are struggling to create content, consider hiring or outsourcing a marketing/communications coordinator.”

And of course, feel free to contact us at our Toronto office if you would like help updating your homepage.

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26Jul

6 Basic Search Engine Friendly Tips

Posted in Website Marketing Tags: SEO

In our previous blog post about creating a successful brochure web site, we slipped in a few descriptive links to ourselves and our clients. We did this to help tell Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines what these sites are about. Doing this is part of an online marketing strategy called Search Engine Optimization and it is something all business websites should consider. .

Search Engine Optimization is a big field, and running a search marketing campaign can take some time (and dollars).

However, there some things you can do (and should do!) to make sure your homepage and website are friendly to search engines. Descriptive link building, like in our previous post, is one of those things. However, before you get to this stage, you should make sure your site is search engine friendly.

Search Engine Friendly Expectations

If you are in an industry or location that isn’t (yet) highly competitive online, then making your website friendly to search engines will likely result in some “out of the blue” traffic on your site fairly early on.

However, even if you are in a business that is highly competitive online these basic steps are absolutely required to be visible. Doing them early will help down the road. You see, the search engines do value longevity (where they think longevity has value).

Making your site easy to understand early on gives the search engines additional data to determine who your site is important to in the future.

In the search world, longevity is related to reputation; and reputation dictates relevance and authority. SEO is a longer term strategy because it takes time to build that reputation.

6 basic search friendly tips

1. Give your homepage a descriptive title tag (this is the title that appears at the top of your web browser, and when someone bookmarks your web page; it is also the first thing that the user will see if your site comes up in the search results page). Usually this would be your company name and a few words you think people might use to find your business. Make this title tag different for each of your pages.

2. Add a description tag. The description tag is often used as the description that shows with your search result results before someone gets to your site. A good description tag will encourage more people to go to your site when they do find you in the search engine.

3. Use text, not a picture of text on your homepage: Quite often a designer might use non-web friendly fonts to get the right look & feel for a company’s brand. Unfortunately these non-web friendly fonts cannot be rendered using regular, search engine readable text. A picture is used instead.

Find a way with your designer to get the right look & feel with web friendly fonts. If web friendly fonts just aren’t acceptable, you can try embeddable fonts . These fonts are loaded using JavaScript libraries so most browsers will render the text.

4. Use the ALT attribute to provide the descriptive text for any images used. You will not only give more information about the image to the search engine, but you will help users with disabilities who use screen readers.

5. Use one (short) sentence in an H1 heading tag to describe your business. Again, it would be great if you used some (key)words that you think visitors may use to find you on a search engine. Use this sentence to reinforce the main topic of the site or page. Make the heading concise but do include keywords from the title tag mentioned in step #1, and at least one other (or more) keywords you think are important to the page. Keep in mind that this heading is a prominent feature of your page. You do want it to be have keywords, but you also need the heading to be compelling to people reading the page.

6. Don’t use splashpages. If your first page is just an “intro” or “splashpage” (a page with minimal information – usually used to set the tone of your website, give country/language options, or as an advertisement). Other than generally not being very usable for visitors, splash pages typically don’t offer much for search engines to work with. Since your homepage is usually the easiest page to get indexed by search engines, make sure it has content!

Here are some additional guidelines directly from the three main search engines:

Google: Google-friendly sites | Google’s SEO Guide

Yahoo: Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines

Bing: Guidelines for successful indexing

Now that we’ve discussed how your site can make friends with search engines, we’ll get back to how your site makes friends with your customers – by offering them something new when they return – stay tune to our next blog post “Your homepage – Change it up!”

And of course, feel free to contact us at our Toronto office if you would like help with a search engine friendly evaluation of your website.

3 Comments »

18Jul

Can you influence The Influence Project?

Posted in Social media Tags: Fast Company, The Influence Project

The Influence Project by Fast Company is a controversial online experiment in viral marketing.

The project aims to “show what happens when an individual takes an audience at rest and applies an unbalanced force–through suggestion, advice or direction–that converts it into an army of action”.

The idea is to upload your picture, get an ‘influence link’ then get as many people as you can to click on your link & register. The more people who click & register on your link, the bigger your picture gets. That picture will appear in the November print issue of Fast Company.

Fast Company did think some wild & crazy things would happen (SEO, spamming, 4chan, charity bribes).

But would you like to see how influential you really are?

This is social media. We don’t have to change the channel, we can change the conversation.

Would you like to see if the project can be upended completely?

Is the winner really going to be a smiling social media/PR/marketing expert?

Or can it be a collective statement of anonymity? Or rebellion? Or a push to help someone who is missing – who’s absence is the influence on those left behind?

Or can the real most influential person be someone that convinces many different people to engage with The Influence Project in a way that CAN’T be measured?

Here are some ideas I came up with to “change the conversation” – add your own in the comments!

1) Create an all black anonymous profile picture – see if it can get to the top.

2) What about creating a “black out” of profile pictures? What would it look like if you asked your influence group to change their profile to black?

3) What about a massive piece of art as people simply choose their favourite colour as their picture?

4) What about making your profile mean something? Use a missing child picture for your profile. You could turn Fast Company into a giant milk carton.

(Out of all these ideas, this is my personal favourite).

Here are three missing children with influence URLs that need your help:

Javon:

Missing since June 15, 2010

Influence URL: http://fcinf.com/v/brh6

Full details about Javon at the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children

Norma:

Missing since July 15, 2010

Influence URL: http://fcinf.com/v/b63o

Full details about Norma at the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children

Sara:

Missing since June 8, 2010

Influence URL: http://fcinf.com/v/cvhe

Full details about Sara at the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children

You can find out more about missing children here:

http://www.missingkids.com/

http://www.mcsc.ca/

5) Or maybe completely mess with them. Fast Company expected deception for personal gain. “hello 4Chan” they said. But what about deception to mess up the experiment? What about creating tonnes of anonymous profiles and clicking them up? Will Fast Company accept this or start killing spam profiles?

This project is an “editorial investigation”. So let’s give them their investigation. Not by opting out, but by opting in using whatever unexpected & creative means you can think of.

What do you think – can the Influence Project be influenced?

6 Comments »

29Jun

The Benefits of Being Social: HST, TBOT, CBC, The Star, & The Minister of Revenue

Posted in Social media

Our company, a Toronto small business marketing firm, has been getting some press attention recently.

First we were on the CBC (radio and TV) talking about our 10% HST sale.

The Toronto Star saw our blog article and called to get more details on how we think the HST is going to benefit companies using our print and digital marketing services.

And finally, John Wilkinson, the Ontario Minister of Revenue, is planning a visit for this Friday to find out more about our business, the challenges we face, and why we are glad about the demise of the outdated and harmful PST.

Of course, it will be an honour to meet a public official, and it is exciting to be in the media. However, as a business, we are very interested in how all this raises our profile and promotes what we offer.

How did all this free publicity come about? Simple – by being social.

This sort of thing is exactly what is behind the excitement of social media marketing.

The interesting thing for us is that it started offline, at a Toronto Board of Trade networking meeting.

The Toronto Board of Trade holds regular networking events, and they are a fantastic way to get business, find good vendors, and increase your knowledge. However, more importantly I found these networking events are a great way to get the conversation started. And that’s what social marketing is all about – the conversation (vs. the sale).

Resulting from my conversations with my relationship manager Marla Tobe at the Toronto Board of Trade, I was introduced to the CBC (TV & radio). From the CBC and our twitter feed we were introduced to the Minister of Revenue’s office. And the Toronto Star found our blog and called for an interview.

So get out there & join the conversation.

If you are a member of the Toronto Board of Trade – speak with your relationship manager. Make sure they know about you, who you are, what your ideal client is, and what you hope to get from TBOT. (And if you aren’t a member – Join!)

Be social, and see where it takes you!

Updates:
- Article in the June 30th, Toronto Board of Trade Bulletin
- July 2nd: A second mention in The Toronto Star
- News release by the Ministry of Revenue
- And a brief mention on Global TV June 30th (clip not available online)

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28Jun

3 elements for successful brochure website homepages

Posted in Website Content

Very often your websites homepage is the first impression any of your customers will have of you.

Like a warm smile and a strong handshake, your homepage sets the stage for how your customers think of you, and what action they will take next – will it be the one you want?

Other than a compelling design, and good writing, most successful homepages for brochure websites have at least these three elements:

1. Home page visual focal point: A picture that “says it all”.

For Casa Duna (a cottage in Southampton Ontario), an animated slideshow for the focal point quickly takes a visitor through a series of beautiful pictures highlighting the cottage and the area.

For Toronto video production company Video Excellence, we used a series of images and text as an intro to the range of services offered.

2. A BRIEF bit of homepage text that describes what you are offering.

For us (a Toronto website design company), we start with a greeting and a question highlighting how our job is to fulfill your goals: “Hello. Where would you like to go?”.

You will notice we went for subtle and didn’t include a big picture – instead focusing on a core message, our bold arrow, topped off with our ladybug for humanity.

For Toronto beach spa and salon Hair Dynamix, we used this brief bit of homepage text to establish the location and their primary benefit – being a family owned business with a personal touch.

3. Keep it simple.

You may have a lot to say, but let your home page be the beginning of the conversation.

Use your text and picture focals to convey the primary elements you want your visitors to “takeaway”. Maybe add a little extra direction, such as the right-hand internal “ad” we setup for Collingwood & Port Carling interior design firm Peaks and Rafters.

Don’t start the relationship by trying to tell your potential customer everything about you. Give your visitor a good first impression. They can get the details as they explore your website (or better yet – call you!)

Side note: Did you notice the descriptive links to our clients (and ourselves) in this blog? We did this to help Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines know what these sites are about.

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18Jun

Kobayashi Technology on CBC – HST Savings Coming Your Way!

Posted in General

Hello there,

CBC came by yesterday to ask what my thoughts were about the HST as a small business owner.

For us, it is a very good thing. So much so, we’re going to pass on the savings to our customers! But more on that in a bit.

First: Is your eCommerce store HST ready?

Most every business is of course affected. For those in Ontario with eCommerce stores (and who are already registered for GST), you should already be charging GST, PST, and HST depending on where you are shipping your products.

If you haven’t done so yet, you need to prepare now to update your shopping cart to the new rules. (If you need help – just let us know!).

There are nuances and transition rules, so check with your accountant or visit the Canada Revenue Agency website.

(And don’t forget the small business credit to help with the transition)

OK, back to your HST savings.

Over this next year, we will be benefiting from the transition to HST.

• We get to save 8% on all goods that we purchase! (That extra 8% is fully deductible as an Input Tax Credit – PST wasn’t).

• Our customers are all businesses, and they get to deduct any extra tax we will charge.

• The cost of our print design service just went down: Because print design is a service resulting in a tangible good, PST was applicable. Now it is fully refundable as part of the HST.

• Our administrative expenses go down a little.

• And finally everyone will be calling the tax by its proper name (PST is actually RST – for some reason RST never stuck…).

Instead of waiting for market pressures to reduce our rates a little, we are going to front-load the PST savings for the year and give all our clients 10% off any new web design, web development, email marketing, logo and print design projects for the month of July only.

If you’ve been thinking of doing a project – now is the time!

We have limited resources, so please let us know as quickly as you can.

Best regards,

Brent Kobayashi
President
416-410-3266 x1

· We get to save 8% on all goods that we purchase! (That extra 8% is fully deductible as an Input Tax Credit).

· Our customers are all businesses, and they get to deduct the extra tax we will charge.

· And our administrative expenses go down a little.

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19Apr

8 basic ways to promote your website WITHOUT SEO/SEM/Social Media

Posted in Website Marketing

Your website is out there trying to market for you.

Are you marketing for your website?

Recently, a potential client came to us with a big concern. Their website wasn’t generating enough business for him – almost nothing. This client was looking to add more pages to the website (currently only had one) and maybe do some search engine optimization. The site was a couple of years old supporting an existing “bricks & mortar” small business.

We checked out the site statistics – yep – almost no traffic.

Something wasn’t quite computing. Most established businesses with a website will get a decent amount of traffic – even if the website isn’t a major lead generator.

We did a little bit of investigation and found the problem. The client wasn’t promoting their website in the most basic ways (business cards, letterhead, invoices, email signature, etc)! This case may seem extreme, but we find it isn’t uncommon for business to think a website is isn’t important with existing and word-of-mouth clients.

There is often an impression that a website is out there to get brand new business – straight out-of-the-blue off of the internet.

However, we think the primary small business website goal for most is to support your existing efforts – but your website can’t do that if you don’t support it.

Here are 8 basic ways to drive traffic to your website – and they have nothing to do with SEO, online marketing, or social media.

Tell us, are you doing these 8 basic steps?

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05Apr

4 key aspects of a brochure site

Posted in Website Goals

The first goal for many small business websites is to support existing “offline” sales efforts. (So called “brochure sites”)
(Is this one of your goals for your website? Tell us in this mini-poll)

And how does a brochure website achieve this goal?

First – it exists. Like a business card, a logo, and even a business name, it is one way of showing that you actually see some longevity to what you are doing. A clear way of saying “yes indeed – I want more business!”.

You may think this should be obvious to your customers – but think of the number of businesses you have encountered that just didn’t seem to care – just didn’t give you the feeling they would even be there next year. A website is a simple tool that can help give some solidity to your company.

Second – it gives a potential client an immediate and visual impression of your company. With more real estate than a business card or a brochure, your website has the ability to strongly enforce your customer’s impression of you.

Finally – it gives a potential client a chance to explore your business a little, on their own terms.

Here are four things we have found are “key” to a “supportive/brochure” website:

Visually it reflects your price range
(What would yours be? high end, low cost, reasonably priced, expensive but worth it, wholesale, other…?)
Says exactly what you do
(What products or services do you offer?)
Gives all your basic contact information (phone, fax, email, address)
Gives a little more for those that want to suss you out a bit (company history, profile of the key players, business philosophy, portfolio/gallery).

Place this information on a website that has a reasonable amount of professional polish, and your website has now achieved goal #1 – the rest is up to you!

Have other goals for your website?

As far as what you can do to help your brochure website, next week we have an article planned about what YOU should be doing to help your website succeed…

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Online Friendly

Where you can get the simple facts on how to create online friendly and desirable websites and experiences.

7 Questions to Discover Content For Your Website

1 (Big) Step to Legitimize Your Small Business on the Web