This video by Design850 owner Mike Bunton will give you the 3 basic items every video that you use on the web should have.  If you are uploading to YouTube, Facebook or some other video sharing platform, having these 3 parts on every video will ensure an effective marketing piece for your Tallahassee area business.

Every business should be using video to promote their business without exception.  What will set your video apart from all the other videos that are out there on the web?  Follow these three quick tips and apply them to all the videos you use and you should see a difference.    Making sure your videos are branded by having an opening/welcome screen, a lower third showing your name, business name and contact information (like a phone number or website URL) and closing with an extended screen having a specific call to action will help maximize each of the videos that you are using to market your business online.

If you are a Tallahassee area business and need assistance in marketing your business on the web – from web site design to email marketing to lead capture to video marketing to search engine optimization – Design850 invites you to drop us a quick email or give us a call and we can chat about how we can help your business market more effectively online.

Simply put, ‘blog’ means:

That’s right.  The BEST way to get a better listing on Google is to have a blog.  Now you might only need to post to that blog once or twice a month or maybe you are in a competitive market where you might need to post once a week or more.    The basic rule is: adding more unique and helpful content to your website on an ongoing basis is the BEST way to help the placement of your website in the search engines.

As you work on the search engine optimization of your website, remember that it doesn’t happen overnight – it takes time.   Yes, there are techniques that you can use (like video marketing) to speed the process up some, but having new and original content added to your site on a regular basis is the best method for long term success.

Video marketing is powerful and accelerates an audience getting to know, like, favor and trust you!

There’s a lot of buzz around companies like Groupon and Living Social both here in Tallahassee and all over the country.  I use both of these services and have found them to be of value for me personally.

I was reading this post – the 5 Things to Consider Before You Test Social Coupons – and found some of them very helpful for local businesses (both here in Tallahassee and all across the U.S.) to make sure that you have fully thought out the implications of using one of these services BEFORE you actually jump on the bandwagon.   These coupon services are not for all businesses and I believe that business owners should talk with their online internet marketing consultant before committing to using a service like Groupon or Living Social.

Here is another post written by a local marketing company on the Tallahassee Grapevine and it talks about using these coupon services and why they consider it bad for some businesses and local economies.

The purpose in this post is to make sure that all local business owners understand how these services work, think about all the negatives that COULD happen, what does your business want to get out using this services and then talk with someone knowledgeable before moving into the social coupon arena.

Again, I love these services.   I have been introduced to businesses here in Tallahassee that I wasn’t aware existed before I got their Groupon or Living Social deal, I have re-visited businesses that I hadn’t been to in a long time and their deal got me back in the door and yes, there are just ones that I have skipped over – but generally I think these social coupon services work for certain businesses.

Check out the video below and if you are a small business that needs help in understanding how video marketing can help your business, drop me an email or give me a call and let’s chat.

The common mistakes

• Strange domain name – Increasing number of business websites use strange domain names that do not reflect their businesses in any way. I’ve see some that use hyphens, just because they want to include their target keywords in their domain names. Others choose very long domain names that include their most important keywords. All these cause confusion to customers and visitors. A business domain name has to be short, contains no hyphen and reflects the brand of the company. A short name that reflects a brand helps everyone to easily remember the website’s address. So, always go for memorable names!
• Bad color combination - I strain my eyes on some websites to read text, because of the bad color combinations used. Some use very faint colors for text, while others blur the text with background colors or images. It is important that a business site choose a good color combination that blends effortlessly with the entire theme.  Probably the best tip I have learned about color combinations – have your text appear on a white or very like background – there is a reason books aren’t printed with white text on black pages – think about it!
• Auto-playing music – Nothing annoys me more than visiting a business site and being surprised by an auto-playing music. Some of these businesses use it as a marketing technique, but its actual effect on visitors is negative. I believe a business website should not set any marketing audio to automatically play on page load. Use proper business ethics and give visitors a choice to turn the audio on if they like to hear it.
• Contact Information - Prospective customers and existing ones deserve the right to know where the business they’re dealing with is located. But unfortunately, many business websites don’t include physical addresses on their sites. Some even lack telephone numbers where customers can reach them in real-time. These issues cause lack of trust and confidence.
• Web page loading issues – Some business websites take forever to load. This is most commonly caused by server overload, badly-coded scripts that make dumb SQL queries and those that make heavy use of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), such as Flash and SilverLight. Studies have shown that Internet users have very short attention span, and want to do whatever they come for as quickly as possible. If a site doesn’t load within a few seconds, they will go off to a competitor’s site. To help keep visitors on your business site and reduce the bounce rate, get a server or hosting that guarantees faster loading of web pages. Also make sure your web-based software is developed very well with good database architecture. Moreover, avoid heavy use of RIAs, as they tend to largely slow down loading time. Flash and SilverLight are sparingly used to spice up web pages, but it is wrong for web pages to heavily depend on them.
• A Long Story about the business - I’ve noticed on so many Chinese and some other business websites that they spend too much unnecessary time and space talking about how many acres of land their factories cover and how many employees they have. A visitor is not interested in knowing these facts. Go straight to the point and let visitors know about your products and/or services and their benefits of buying them.

As a business owner, I know you will take the above-mentioned precautions seriously and not want to make the same common mistakes that drive visitors away from sites.

Let’s look at some of the top reasons why Tallahassee businesses would want to use a ‘FAN’ page on Facebook:

• unlimited membership – profiles or groups are capped at 5000
• administrators appear as the business when posting – so you can have multiple admins and they can all be posting as the business
• indexed by external search engines (Google, etc.) – one of my favorites!
• can host applications – once you get the basics of Facebook, having a more interactive fan page is a must and the ability to host applications is important
• enables analytics and tracking – you get detailed statistics on who ‘LIKE’s your business, the age and sex demographics, etc.
• resembles a regular profile page – and function like profile pages too!

Now let’s look at some of the reasons why businesses might choose a ‘GROUP’ page on Facebook:

Have more control over who joins by setting for member approval.
Can be ‘private’ thus creating a more ‘secure’ environment for sharing.

Now obviously, the choice for Tallahassee businesses is Facebook fan pages.

The BIGGEST reason to choose a fan page is that the updates you make to your business fan page appear in the news stream of your fans so they can instantly react and INTERACT with you and your business!

While both Fan and Group pages can be beneficial in certain instances, overall the Fan Page is far superior to the Group Page when it comes to maximizing a brand’s Facebook presence.

Type in the URL of your website as www.design850.com replacing the ‘design850′ with your web site URL.   Your web site should load in the browser.

Now do the same thing only this time leave off the ‘www’ at the front and just type design850.com and replace the ‘design850′ with your web site URL.   Again, your web site should load in the browser.

In the second example, you now want to check to see if your web server added the ‘www’ to your domain name.  If not, you need to contact your web master or web host.

What you want to prevent from a search engine optimization point of view is having your domain search by Google (and other search engines) from viewing www.design850.com and design850.com as two separate domains/web sites.   As you add more and more content to your site, you want to ensure that only ONE gets indexed and ranked by search engines.

This can be corrected on your server (or your web host) by performing what is known as a ’301 redirect’.  This redirect is done by a single setting to tell any browser or search engine bot that is visiting your site that it should add the ‘www’ to the domain if it was not there when someone visited a link or typed in your domain.

Design850 can help correct this and other SEO basics on your web site to ensure that you are being ranked as high as possible in the search engines – give us a call at 850-445-2076.

• Links – check your links to ensure that they are still live.    This would refer to both links that point to other pages within your web site and then also links that point to pages that are not on your web site.   Hopefully your internal links will not be an issue, but linking to external sites could be problematic because other web sites might change their site structure periodically and your links might need to be updated.

• Mobile Phones – since just about everyone has a mobile phone, you should be checking your site on a regular basis on multiple mobile phones to ensure that your site is visible and functions properly in the mobile environment.

• Analytics – this should be done at least every 30 days.   You should always be looking at analytics so you know where your site visitors are coming from and how they are finding you.    I know that approximately 40% of traffic to design850.com and I can see how that is changing every month (or week in my case).  I also can know what other sites are driving the most traffic to my site.

• Newsletters/Forms – you should be testing your forms on a regular basis to ensure that the emails are getting through to you and to also know what the end user receives if they sign up for your newsletter or send a request through your contact form.

• Images – the last item that you should check on a regular basis is that the images that you have on your site all load correctly.   This is especially true if you have any sort of online store where the images are a necessary part of your ability to conduct business.