social marker

There is a tool that I have been using for some time to social bookmark sites that I like, SocialMarker.com. This tool helps automate some of the process of social bookmarking with all major social websites.

The Pros:
Normally when you social bookmark sites you have to go to the website, login and then bookmark the site I want to. If you want to social bookmark multiple sites this can definitely take some time. Social Marker takes most of the work out of it

The Cons:
The service is not completely automated so there is some work that you will have to do by hand, but I think The Pros outweigh this considerably.

If anyone has seen a service that is better, feel free to comment about it and I would love to take a look.

Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant

For years it has been the common belief that money was the key and source of employee happiness and longevity. Although money is important, it can’t buy employee happiness and your customers and business livelihood suffer the most when your employees are unhappy with their job.

It’s true. Many studies have confirmed that employee happiness has a direct correlation to customer satisfaction. Although money may keep an unhappy employee coming back to work everyday, an employee who does not feel engaged in the workplace, is going to deliver less in service and productivity. For most companies these are the individuals interacting with their customers and representing their business everyday. Bottom line, if you take great care of your employees, they will take great care of your customers and your customers will keep coming back, again and again.

Need to see this concept at work before you change your management position? Take a look at Google. This search engine giant made the list on Fortune Magazine’s Top One Hundred Places To Work in 2007 and 2008. What makes Google such a great place to work? This was not based on pay scales for employees, but on Google’s continuous efforts to support a healthy work environment for all employees. Now, most businesses can’t afford to pamper their workers with on-site laundry facilities, massage rooms, free gourmet lunches and a virtual college campus of relaxation and fitness, but Google has some programs that can help any business. Take their Innovation Time Off policy. Using this motivation technique, which encourages employees to spend 20% of their work week on a project that interests them, Google has not only given their employees the space, time and confidence they need to be themselves and be happy, but they have benefited from the plan as well, with great programs like Gmail and Adsense being the results of such freedom. You can learn more about Google’s Innovation Time Off policy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Innovation_time_off, but in the end a workplace built on great employees leads to even greater business.

Poor leadership and challenging workplace cultures are among the many reasons quality employees leave. In addition, environments that are constantly monitored are stifling. Employee engagement means making your employees believe they are part of something pretty special. Employees are seeking to be treated with respect and allowed to grow and be a part of the business. Acknowledge a workers worth to you and your company. Invite your employees to share their opinions and allow them to become active participants in discussions and business matters.

Start by instilling an attitude of care and respect for your employees. Discuss expectations, goals, and future plans and keep your employees in the loop. Demonstrate that they are a part of the whole picture and the success of your company and business depends on their satisfaction with their work environment. Your business is only as good as the people working for it and if you want happy customers, be a great employer.

Aside from avoiding the greed laden financial scandal, could Krispy Kreme have taken a different path over the past 20 years? The answer is yes. Lets start with “why ruin a good thing?”. In their first 20 years of operation, Krispy Kreme was a giant in the doughnut world of the Southeastern United States. They were a thriving business with their first chain stores and they had standardized their doughnut mix and necessary machinery to produce the same quality and consistency of product through out each store. They probably weren’t making millions, but they had that “only in the South” flare and people would travel far and wide just to get their hands on the fresh hot glazed doughnuts. Krispy Kreme doughnuts were unique and word of mouth kept the doughnuts flowing out of the stores and, even today, word of mouth is the most effective marketing available.

By the year 2000 Krispy Kreme was not only all over the east and west coasts, they were international. Expansion in the 90’s was insane. And it didn’t stop, by 2004 Krispy Kreme not only had 429 factory stores cranking out hot glazed treats, but they had them on the shelves in 20000 grocery and convenience stores. Why travel to get the doughnuts from the factory store when you can easily pick them up while shopping for groceries or getting gas? What was once a high-end doughnut store chain, with a so fresh their still hot product, was now everywhere-only often not as fresh and generally not hot. They lost their long line of customers. They made their own factory stores obsolete. Had they stayed small and avoided the grocers and 7-11s, they may have saved their brand value. Coincidentally, it was at this same time that Krispy Kreme stocks started to fall and the company began experiencing “unexplained” profit losses.

Expansion is good, but it needs limits. Look at In&Out. It’s a California and Nevada only burger chain, but people love their stuff. They have high quality food for being a burger joint. They have had many offers to go national, but have opted not because they chose to avoid over-saturating, the way many companies do-which often leads to failure. Brilliance…

Keeping up with the times is a marketing must if you want to remain successful in our ever-changing world. Krispy Kreme’s Hot Glazed Doughnuts are far from a healthy snack. Very few humans missed the health revolution with the low-carb diets and movement away from fried and processed foods. People are eating better and it may be time to get creative and market some new products that fall in line with this trend. There was the whole-wheat doughnut and talk of the not-yet-seen sugar free variety, but there is plenty of room for providing a healthier alternative without losing the sugar-glaze that attracts thousands. On the same note, coming up with other non-doughnut products like fresh squeezed juices, organic milks and getting a consistent coffee throughout the stores could add a larger customer base. Donuts aren’t the biggest seller at competing businesses like Dunkin Donuts. People frequent these locals for the coffee, bagels and muffins. Not just for some sugar-glaze or jelly filling.

The Krispy Kreme brand is far from dead, but a different marketing strategy 20 years ago may have saved them from the struggles they are having today. They started in 1937 with a brilliant strategy of producing a superior product and promoting it very well, but they limited their success with over-saturation and a limited product line during changing times. It may be time to bring the fresh hot glaze back to it’s roots and let it start growing again.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98

Wondering where to get insight-look locally. Tailor your marketing strategy to appeal to the shared cultural norms, values and traditions of those in your target neighborhood. Learn as much as you can about people. Where they eat, if they like french fries, Jo-Joes, or potato wedges. Do they prefer recycled products to pre-consumer brands? Understanding the variety of people in your own community can shed new light on an old marketing campaign.

Don’t forget to integrate ethnicity into your strategy. This is extremely important for product distributors. If you are a food provider in New Mexico and you don’t offer green chili, you are going to miss out on some serious business opportunities. Take the time to research the demographics of an area and then become familiar with them on a local level. This applies to national chains as well. The Sonic’s in New Mexico serves Green Chile Cheeseburgers, and you wonder why they have long drive through lines.

Does your marketing strategy reflect the changes in today’s culture or are you still selling to the group audience? Lumping all of your viewers as one mass of people with all the same interests and lifestyles is a huge mistake that could cost you valuable business. Expanding your plan to meet the needs of a variety of cultures and individuals will demonstrate your growth and change, keeping you in step with the rest of the world.

Thanks for reading!

Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98

Communication is much more than words. Communication involves tone, gestures, meaning and movement. Dumping lots of facts, figures and bullets on your site doesn’t mean you are delivering a message your audience wants to hear. Think true sincere communication, not marketing. Be honest and sincere, offer knowledge not sales jargon, and leave the technical stuff for the glossaries.

Write your content in a natural voice, as if speaking directly to a customer. No filler. No fluff. Keep your content interesting, engaging and relevant to ensure a fulfilling experience for your online guests. Your website should be about giving your customers attention, addressing their need to know and the ability to find an immediate answer to their question.

When looking at well-communicated sites like www.futurenowinc.com, their success is no mystery. They know why a consumer would visit their site, address that need to know and help to identify paths to meet those needs. All of this is done in a no-nonsense tone and they don’t squander their message space bolstering their own business egos.

As many businesses have learned the hard way, bad content can kill your site. You don’t have to be boring because you are talking about business. Be creative. Be Bizarre. Just don’t be mind numbing or the only place your content will lead is to the back button.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98

Spammers have gotten smarter and smarter and work has become easier for them. Back in the day, spammers had to hand search for and enter your email address to be able to achieve their love for filling up people’s inbox with junk… now its automated. In this day and age, they have bots that search your website and can pull your email address off and add it to their database for junk mail. They don’t even have to lift a finger after they get it started.

A good friend of mine, Kerry Jones, who is a great programmer, created a free email encoder tool I highly recommend. What it does is scramble the code on the backend so the scammers bots can’t pick it up off your website, but looks the same on the front end. I personally use it and have seen a dramatic decrease in my spam intake because of it.

Click on the link I provided above, simply enter your email address and a title (which shows up when you mouse over the link it creates) and click Encode. You will see the code generated. I created one using my email address and it looks like this:

<a href=”&#109;&#097;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;&#058;Rafferty&#64;Studio98&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;” title=”Rafferty@Studio98.com”>Rafferty&#64;Studio98&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;</a>

On my website it would show up as a standard html email link.

You just fill that code in the html of your website in place of your email address now and you are all set. Studio98 implements this email encoder on every website we do for clients, greatly reducing the spam intake for them. Give it a try…

Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98

Per Wikipedia, DVD-R was started by Pioneer in 1997. Its major competition came 5 years later (2002), DVD+R. DVD+R was started by coalition called the DVD+RW Alliance. It says that this format uses a number of improved technologies that, while generally unnoticeable to the end user, make a more reliable technology. It also goes over how many older (meaning pre 2002) DVD players were not compatible with the DVD+R’s, so you could run into that trouble.

Fortunately, all the new DVD players are compatible with both formats. Unfortunately, I have run into compatibility issues with important DVD’s because some clients still do have their old DVD players and couldn’t play the DVD+Rs.

In my mind, the solution was to use DVD-R’s. There were compatibility issues when we had produced some DVD’s with the DVD+R and since then we have just stuck with DVD-R. I will continue to do this at least for now. When the “old” DVD players are 95% non existent, I will take another look at the developments and see which one we will use at that point because there definitely advantages with either one.
Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98

p.s. I would like to make, there is a misconception on the name of DVD-R. People think it is DVD minus R, when it is actually DVD dash R.

I have written a more indepth description and history on a squidoo page called DVD-R vs. DVD+R Formats – Which one is better.

Have you ever written an article?

Have you ever written anything on the web?

Has everything you’ve written been indexed and placed by Google in the exact search terms you wanted?

Well if so, then close this window and move on with life. For the 99.99 percent of you out there where this is not the case, read on, because I have some pointers that will help with this.

I was talking with a client last week, he was saying that Google wasn’t indexing the articles he wrote in the search terms he was going for. I asked to see the articles he had written. I read them over and spotted exactly what his problem was…

He was not using the words he wanted his article to show up in, he was using words related to these. I then checked with a few other people that claimed they had the same problem. One-for-one I found the same thing; they thought that Google would index the article for the search terms they wanted because it was RELATED to what they were talking about. Unfortunately, they forgot that, although Google is a very efficient “smart” search engine with millions of dollars in development, it’s not a sentient human.

Let’s take a specific example of using this. The keywords that we are trying to get this article to show up in are Good Green Grass (name of the company) and Lawn Care:

Article Title:

Bad: Green Grass is the best grass

Good: Do it yourself Lawn Care by Good Green Grass

The title is an important place to put keywords. Being the nature of titles, Google will look at this and see what your article is about, given the content in the article matches up it index the article accordingly.

Article Summary:

I recommend that you don’t just take a paragraph or two out of the article and make it the summary. Write a summary, taking advantage of keywords where you can to gain the most exposure for your articles. A lot of the article directories will have listings of articles with the title and summary being shown. What’s written in the summary is one of the factors Google takes into account on where to index you on pages that show listings.

Just as an example, I wouldn’t have a summary like this, “Lawn care by Good Green Grass has Lawn care services so you don’t have by Grass, but Good Green Grass.” As a reader I would think that you are writing for search engines, negating me as a client.

Take advantage of having captured your clients attention this far by saying things like, “Good Green Grass is providing do-it-yourself lawn care tips for those who want to have a beautiful, green lawn, by doing it themselves.” You can see the additional keywords you get by doing this, beautiful, green lawn, etc.

Article Body:

It’s important to use the search term you are trying to get the articles ranked for as keywords in the article itself. You are going to have to use your own judgment on the frequency of your keyword, but a good viewpoint to use is, how many times would you want to see it if you were reading the article as an actual human?

One difference in articles from press releases is that articles need to be informational reports for people to read. They can’t be too self promotional. Take the time to make yourself the authority on your business and having given your customers free information, become their friends. When you become that, you will have more business than you know what to do with.

When writing the body of the article think of different variations of the keywords you are going for. These will help get ranked in related keywords, gaining more exposure.

Resource Box:

Most sites have a resource box a.k.a. an author’s bio. This is the place where you can put your self promotional message. If the site allows links to be placed in the resource box, do it, because then you are gaining inbound links as well as all the other advantages. I will be writing more articles covering the details of how to properly format a resource box and covering each of the different fields you can fill out on an article in more detail.

Keywords:

Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the list. Most sites give you a limit of the number of keywords or number of characters. A lot of the sites that we use limit you to 150 characters in the resource box, this is going to vary from site to site.

Summary:

The main point is to get creative in how to word the search terms you are going for. You need to make it so that it doesn’t seem like you are writing for the search engines, but clients. You must include the keywords though, otherwise your article is less relevant and will not show up to the extent it could. The more you give to other people (not necessarily cash, talking more about information in this case), the more you are going to get back in the end. If you make it a little fun to read while writing, that’s another plus.

Rafferty Pendery

CEO Studio98

Article submission is the process of taking an article relevant to your company or the products or services you deliver and uploading it to article directories. Article directories are websites that collect articles on many different topics, ranging from Arts & Entertainment to Health to Technology. There is no standard list of categories for articles to be submitted to, so you are going to have to choose the most appropriate category on each site.

Examples of Some Article Directories

There are so many article directories out there, it would be impractical to list them all here. Below are a few different article directories that I recommend.

http://www.articledashboard.com

http://ezinearticles.com

http://articlefriendly.com

http://www.articlenetworks.com

http://www.articleplatform.com

Articles vs. Press Releases

There are a few differences between articles and press releases. Articles are more informational type promotion regarding the subject of your business. For example, if you were a spa, you could write an article on “How to Properly Care for Your Nails”. A Press Release is more of a self promotional tool to release some news about your company or products. Articles generally get disapproved if you make them too much of a self promotional piece.

Article Submission vs. Other Strategies Out There

If you look at the purpose of Google, providing good relevant content to their users, articles aligns with this perfectly. Article submission is not a trick or gimmick, it is providing good, relevant content.

There are other “get ranked quick” schemes out there. I DO NOT suggest being a part of these at all. Google spends millions of dollars finding these sort of schemes and it is bound to be shot down sooner or later. You might as well spend your time and money working on something that is going to align with the purpose of Google and not just get you deleted. That’s not to say that you can’t abuse article submission and get content deleted, because you can. If you follow the guidelines of the sites and use article submission for the intended purpose, then you reduce your risk significantly.

The whole idea of article submission is that you provide good information to the users on the internet and it will help build your search engine presence and peoples’ trust in you.

Two Pronged Approach

Article submission really is a 2 pronged approach.

1. When you submit articles, there is a space at the end where you can put links to your site (most sites limit you to 3 links in the resource box). Inbound links are a huge factor in how search engines rank your site on different keywords. So now you are publishing good, relevant content and getting inbound links for it. It works wonderfully whenever we have done it for our clients.
2. Because there are so many people submitting articles to these article directories, they are being searched all the time by Google. You can get the articles that you submit to be ranked by Google as well. If done properly, you will start to see many listings of the article you submitted showing up in Google.

Summary

Article submission has proven to be a great tool. We have used it for our clients to build a strong presence on the internet and search engines. Use it properly and you will win. It can take some work to get started, but once you do, I’m telling you it will be worth it.

Studio98 does have an article submission service where we will take your articles about your products, services or company and post them to 100 article directories, helping to keep your focus on what’s important, delivering great service to your clients.

Rafferty Pendery
CEO Studio98
Website: http://www.RaffertyPendery.com
Blog: http://blog.raffertypendery.com

“Sell what your customers want, when they want it.”

The web has made this very easy, from large conglomerate sites like www.Amazon.com to niche sites such as www.PamperedPuppy.com. The availability and access of the web has empowered users to such a degree that it has affected how all customer relations are conducted on and off the web. The web made it easy for customers to access information when and where they want. They are no longer hooked into high pressure sales cycles when buying cars, they just look up all the information they want on any of the cars they want in the comfort of their own home.

SEO has become the game of finding out what internet users are searching and driving sites up in those search terms to gain exposure. This is basically following the datum above: Sell what your customers want, when they want it.

This can be applied multiple ways.

1. The main way is obviously with search engines. I have had clients that tell me “I know what keywords I want to be ranked on”. I then get a list of the words and find out that those search terms are not getting a lot of searches per month. The key then is finding out what keywords people are actually searching, then work to get your site ranked on those terms. Unless you have a high budget, I probably wouldn’t go for a term that has a 15,000 searches a month. If you have a large budget and have some time to really work on it, go for it.

2. There are forums on pretty much every topic or product that can be imagined. Some of the people going to these forums are interested in that topic or product as you can imagine. Posting helpful information on these sites can definitely result in traffic to your site as long as you make sure there is a link back to your site. (This also helps gain links back to your site).

3. Market-specific directories. So far I haven’t seen a great boost in submitting your site to thousands of directories which some companies provide as a service. I think you are much better off submitting your site to market-specific directories. If you are a dentist, submit your site to dentist directories. That way you are getting targeted placement. This has been far more effective in my experience than just submitting your site to random directories.

So those are a few of the ways to apply this datum, there are many others out there as well that I will list for you in the future.

They will be searching whether your site is there or not, so its worth it to work out where you want to get your site listed and a plan to go about getting placement in the search engines. It all starts with coming up with a product or service that people have real interest in and doing honest promotion to gain exposure on the web. Studio98 does custom search engine strategies for companies to help get them ranked in keywords to drive traffic to their website.

Rafferty Pendery