Is Your Web Site or Blog Discriminating Against the Disabled?
Yesterday I received an email from a reader of this blog. On a post called Five Secrets to Promoting Your Business Blog I included a recommendation to post to influential blogs in your niche.
Why didn't he just leave a comment? Read on...
The reader responded that one barrier to leaving comments on blogs is the use of CAPTCHAs--those annoying, messy boxes of alpha-numerics that are supposed to separate the people from the machines. Unfortunately, they can be an impenetrable barrier to people with disabilities. More unfortunately, MaineBusiness.com, which hosts this blog, uses CAPTCHA to prevent comment spam on their site. (So does TypePad, which powers my other blog, flyte blog: web marketing strategies for small business.)
The reader mentioned that census figures show 20% of the population are somehow disabled; obviously, not all of the would be stopped by a CAPTCHA, but why would you use a tool that stops the voice of your reader and quiets the conversation on your site?
Obviously, there's a very good reason for using CAPTCHAs. They help stem the tide of comment spam generated by computers. Spammers use computers to send out an infinite, unending stream of spam to online forms for a variety of reasons. These spams reduce the signal to noise ratio, clog the tubes of the Internet, and reduce everyone's productivity.
New CAPTCHA tools often give people alternatives to those messy alphanumerics. Sometimes there's also an audio option (the computer will read you the answer and you type it in) or a simple math problem (what is 2 + 0) that these spam bots haven't yet caught up with.
Regardless, it's an ongoing battle between keeping communication flowing while keeping noise out. In a recent post, I talked about some of the benefits I've seen by using some non-CAPTCHA tools on online forms. However, ultimately spammers will figure those out as well.
We are in an arms race with the spammers, and of course there are innocent bystanders that are getting hurt, or at least disenfranchised.
There's no right answer on how to handle the balance of reducing incoming spam and keeping the lines of communication open with any human who wants to be part of the conversation. Each company, each Web site owner, and each blogger needs to make their own decision.
What have you found that works for you?
Five Secrets to Promoting Your Business Blog
Blogs can be a powerful marketing tool, but not if they remain hidden. Here are 5 simple tricks all business bloggers should do to promote their blog and reach new customers.
- Create keyword-rich content on a regular basis. No matter what else you do on this list, if you're not regularly posting content to your blog, it will be difficult to attract regular readers.
- Comment on other influential blogs in your niche. Leaving comments on other blogs will create a link from their blog to yours. Leaving inane comments will get your comments deleted, and possibly get you banned. So, leave intelligent comments.
- Link from your Web site to your blog. Especially at the beginning when your Web site has more trust built up at the search engines and your blog has none.
- Ping the news aggregators to let them know when you've updated your blog. I use Pingoat; every time I finish a blog post I immediately go to Pingoat and ping dozens of news services in one step.
- Link to other blogs in your niche (and click on those links.) Whether in a blogroll or in an individual post, link to other bloggers and then click on those links to, a) confirm the links are right, and b) to show up as a referrer on their traffic reports. This should get their attention and maybe they'll end up linking back to you!
There are of course dozens if not hundreds of other things you can do to leverage the power of your business blog, but if there's anything on this list you aren't doing now, I recommend starting right away.
Do you have any techniques that have gotten you more traffic at your blog?
Rich Brooks
Small Business Blogger
Search Engine Tips: Improve Your Intrasite Links
Click here. Learn more. Read more. What do these phrases have in common?
They're all missed opportunities when it comes to creating links on your site.
Search engines use the words in hyperlinks in their rankings. It gives them a hint of what's on the following page. So by using "Click Here" as your link, you're telling the search engine the next page is about "Click Here."
Not very helpful, is it?
Instead, you should use targeted keywords when you link from one page on your site to another. Here are some examples (underlines are for demonstration only, they're not links):
- Learn how to train your dog in just five minutes a day.
- Download our new article, "Sixteen Secrets Your Accountant Doesn't Want You to Know."
- Watch our video on baking a cake for the novice.
- Find out why one dentist out of five recommended sugar gum for his patients who chew gum.
The "following" pages (that you're linking to) need to follow up on the keywords you used. The title, the header and the body content should all be about training your dog in just five minutes a day, or whatever the appropriate topic is.
Your to-do? Review your Web site and update all the intra-site links that are specific to the topic you're linking to.
Your outcome? This will help the search engines understand what your site is all about, and should raise your profile in the search results.
Rich Brooks
Search Engine Marketing for Small Business
Email Marketing Advice: Increase Your Subscriber Base
This month's issue of our email newsletter flyte log is entitled, How I Increased My Email Signup Rate by 5,000%...and How You Can, Too.
Hmmm...you're thinking. I know Rich is terrible with math, so he probably moved a decimal point too far to the right. Or, maybe you're thinking, I know Rich is a marketer, but I think this time he stretched the truth past the breaking point.
Well, math isn't my strong suit, that's true. And, I am a marketer and, according to Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars.
Yet, as far as my rudimentary math skills can tell, it's true. We averaged 2 - 3 new subscribers a month before I tried the process I lay out in this month's issue, and now we average 125 new subscribers a month. (Actually, it's more. I was counting total subscriber base over a 12 month period, but that includes unsubscribes. Our new subscriber rate is even higher.)
But let's be honest, you don't care about my success rate, you want to know how to increase the number of subscribers to your email newsletter. If your email newsletter signup offers nothing more than "Join Our Mailing List," this month's flyte log is for you.
To avoid missing any future issues, be sure to sign up now!
Online Video and the Entrepreneur
I have a pile on my desk. You know the kind. The kind where you put important but not urgent material. Of course, over time those items become more and more urgent...and then irrelevant.
I could tell how long it had been since I sorted through my "important but not urgent" pile because I found an article from the Wall St. Journal I had printed up on 12/26/07. It was called "Lights! Camera! Sales! How to use video to expand your business in a YouTube world." (Since this link was up as of today, I'm hoping it'll be around for a while.)
It's a great article by Raymund Flandez who profiles a number of entrepreneurs and small businesses talking about how they've used video to enhance their marketing and sales. From individual artists to an all natural soda company located in my home town of Scarborough, Maine, to a blender manufacturer, companies are creating videos that are driving demand for their products.
We've seen some success with our own clients who are posting videos online. Eli Newberger has posted both his tuba performances and his speaking gigs at the White House on the YouTube channel we created for him. He has 20 subscribers and has gotten over 5,800 channel views as of this post. That's driving a lot of additional traffic to his Web site.
Sabre Yachts and Newcastle Square Realty have also recently launched YouTube channels as well.
Keyword rich content may help with search engine rankings, but video engages customers in a way that text by itself rarely can.
Rich Brooks
As Seen on YouTube
Tourism's New Math: What Maine's Tourist Economy Needs Now
There's a front page article in the PPH today about a new method of calculating tourism's impact on the Maine economy, and a lot of people aren't happy about it. It's hard to know what the impact will be, but as the article notes,
If tourism promotion doesn't appear to be generating as much
bang for the buck as previously thought, [Vaughn Stinson, chief executive officer of the
Maine Tourism Association] said,
lawmakers could be less supportive of continued funding. His
concern is heightened by the state's budget shortfall.
The bottom line is that companies involved in the tourist industry here in Maine may be getting less support from the MTA, because there's less money to be spent on tourism marketing. This impacts ski resorts, hotels, B&B's, snow mobile rentals, restaurants, and a thousand other businesses that are part of or support the tourist industry.
If I were in tourism I would be planning ahead. Hopefully the funding will still be there, but the possible slack must be picked up by individual businesses. No surprise, but I'd be blogging, developing one or more email newsletters, budgeting money for search engine optimization, and reviewing my Web site based on my analytics. I'd be creating a presence on Facebook and MySpace. In short, I'd be preparing for the worst.
Even if the funding comes in at last year's levels, businesses that are marketing themselves--especially in a recession--will be in a better position to take advantage of it.
Rich Brooks
Web Marketing for Maine Businesses
Is Search Advertising Right for You?
Here's my dirty little secret: as a company, we haven't done a whole lot with search engine advertising, aka pay-per-click advertising, aka PPC. We've never done it for our own services (in large part because our organic listings at Google, Yahoo and other search engines keep us busy enough,) and we've only done it a handful of times for clients.
However, after reading How to Gain Instant Exposure with Search Advertising, I can't wait for the next opportunity. We're hopefully launching a few e-products this year, and it sounds like PPC is one of the right tools to generate tons of leads.
If you're having trouble ranking well organically, whether because you're a new site, your site isn't very search engine friendly, you rely too much on Flash, or you don't have enough content, PPC may be a cost-effective way of driving qualified leads to your site. However, you still need to keep on top of your ad buys and make sure they stay cost effective.
Rich Brooks
Web Marketing for Small Business
What is Your Web Site Doing for You?
What drives more traffic to your Web site, search engine optimization or an ad in the local paper?- How much business did your email newsletter generate for you last year?
- How much did each Web lead cost you last year? What was each one worth?
If you're like most business owners out there, you have no idea. And yet, chances are the answers are at your fingertips.
Almost all hosting companies offer some sort of traffic reports, no matter how rudimentary. If you're unsatisfied with your reports you can have your Web person install Google Analytics, a free traffic reports application that provides an unbelievable amount of detail in a user-friendly layout.
<shameless plug>
If you'd like to learn more about Google Analytics and how to read some of its most important reports, I'll be leading a workshop on Wednesday morning in Portland, Maine called Google Analytics for Online Success. We limit these workshops to just 10 people, so registration is required. The cost is $50 and we feed you, too!
</shameless plug>
Hope to see you there.
Rich Brooks
Analytics Retentive
Google Analytics: Web Marketing Seminar in Portland, Maine
In flyte's Holistic Web Marketing model the four components are:
- Attraction (driving traffic to your site)
- Retention (staying in communication w/customers even when they're not at your site)
- Conversion (getting visitors to take a desired step towards the sale) and
- Measurement (determining how effective different campaigns really are).
It's the last component, measurement, that we'll be talking about at our upcoming workshop, Google Analytics for Online Success.
Web marketing without measurement is like archery without a target. You don't know how well you're doing.
Traffic report programs such as Google Analytics help small business
owners and entrepreneurs understand which online marketing campaigns
are working and which ones should be dropped.
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful analytics program that
can answer all of these questions and more. Best of all, the price of
the software can't be beat: $0.
Attendees will learn:
- How to setup and get the most out of Google Analytics.
- How to read and understand reports, and which reports are essential to your success.
- How to set up Goals so you can track which traffic streams are worth the most to your business.
- How to analyze these reports to make changes to your Web site and improve your conversion rates.
Date: Wednesday, 1/16/2008
Time: 8am - 9:30am
Place: flyte's offices (directions)
Cost: $50, includes coffee & danish type edibles
Registration is required, and the workshop is limited to just 10 people, so REGISTER NOW!
Rich Brooks
flyte school instructor
12 Web Marketing Ideas to Jump Start Your Business
You know those "new" episodes of your favorite TV show when a character gets hit by a car, and then all their friends gather by their bed side and retell their favorite stories through a series of clips?
Welcome to my clip show.
Here's a quick list of the 12 articles we published in flyte log, our monthly Web marketing ezine:
- Your 2008 Web Marketing Plan
- How to Use Social Media to Reach New Customers
- Business Blog Success: 10 Tips for a Profitable Blog
- Increase Your Search Engine Visibility: Three Things You Can Do Today
- Nine Indispensable Online Tools for Your Web-Based Business
- Four Tips to Maximize Your Email Marketing Results
- The Secret to a Web Site That Sells
- Six Blogging Myths That Are Holding You Back
- The Dangers of Relying on Google for Business
- Holistic Web Marketing: An Integrated Approach to Online Success
- Tracking Conversions: Does Your Web Site Turn Suspects into Prospects?
- Informational Products: Selling Your Knowledge Online
There's oodles of ideas in these articles that you can use to jump start your business and build it over the next year. If you'd rather not miss any new articles, please subscribe to flyte log in the box below.
Your 2008 Web Marketing Plan
There's light fluffy snowflakes falling outside my window this morning as I polish off another issue of flyte log, our Web marketing email newsletter...the last for 2007.
Rather than look back on 2007--as good as it was--it's time to look forward to 2008 and start making plans. Web marketing plans, that is.
Today's issue of flyte log is Your 2008 Web Marketing Plan, a month-by-month, itemized list of what you need to do to succeed in 2008.
Your Web marketing plan includes ideas on search engine optimization, blogging, social media, Webinars and more.
Why not take the first step in improving your chances for success in 2008 by signing up for flyte log now, so you never miss another issue?
Web Marketing for Public Relations
I'll be part of an all-day conference for the Maine Public Relations Council this Wednesday, October 17. The annual conference's theme is "The Art and Science of Communication," and goes from 8:30 - 3:30 at the Sheraton Hotel in South Portland.
My topic will be Web Marketing for Public Relations. This is a new lens from which to view Web marketing, at least for me. However, in putting together the presentation I was just blown away by the tools that today's PR professional has at his or her disposal. I mean, I got really excited. I was pacing around the kitchen table as I was creating my slides. And the future looks even more exciting.
If you're a public relations professional, or you're just looking for ways to gain more visibility for your company you can't afford to miss the MPRC's annual conference. Admission is $100 for members, $140 for non-members. Details and registration information can be found on their events page.
Rich Brooks
Web Marketing for PR
Alternatives to YouTube
When people say "video sharing Web site" chances are you think of YouTube. (Or, your eyes glass over as you get all nostalgic about when there were only three channels you had to choose from.)
However, despite YouTube's popularity, it's just one of many options for uploading and sharing video online. Other services may not have the eyeballs, but they offer other enticing services.
PC World has a new list of Top 10 Video Sharing Web Sites for those of you who are ready to look at alternatives to YouTube. The reviews are brief, but include information on:
- price
- video/audio quality
- ease of upload
- embedded player design and
- file size/length limits for each file
For any businesses who have been unsatisfied with the quality of YouTube video, it's worth looking at some of the competition.
Building a Web Site with Search Engines in Mind
While it's never too late to optimize your site for search engine visibility, the best time to do it is before you build it (or rebuild it.)
Why? For the same reason it's better to plan the electrical system before you build your house; it's less expensive to build the electrical system into the house rather than tear down walls to install the wiring.
At the most recent Search Engine Strategies seminar in San Jose, there was a session entitled Search Engine Friendly Design with a panel made up of Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive and Maine's own Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner, Beyond Ink.
The entire session has been documented and can be found at the SE Round Table Web site at Search Engine Friendly Design.
Rich Brooks
Maine Search Engine Marketing
How to Show Your Google Ads Only in Portland, or Bangor, or Lewiston...
There a good post on How to Geotarget Your Google Ads to a Specific City over at SE Round Table.
Why would you want to geotarget your Google Ads? The real question is why wouldn't you? Since every time someone clicks on one of your Google Adwords Ads you pay Google money, you want to make sure that it's a qualified lead. If you're a Bangor dentist, a click from a Portland Web site visitor--no matter how poor her teeth--probably won't land you a new client.
While in the past you could only limit which state the searcher was for, now you can control by city, region and more. If you're going to spend you ad dollars on Google Adwords, spend them wisely.
Why You Should Keep That Old Domain
Often a client may pick up an extra domain or want to promote a new domain as their business focus has changed. There are negative search engine ramifications when you move domain names, but they can be overcome...over time.
However, it's a good idea to keep your old domain pointed to your Web site. That URL may still exist on the business card you gave someone last year, or there may be incoming links to it. The other day I went to what I thought was a client's Web site; I forgot that they were now promoting a new URL, but I didn't realize they had let the old one lapse. Here's what I found:
Yikes.
Not exactly what I'd want people to find when they came looking for me. For a few bucks a year they could have kept their old domain, helping old contacts find them again. That certainly would have paid for itself.
If you did want to shed a domain, you might even try selling it yourself, especially if it's broad enough for another business to take it over.
Rich Brooks
Master of My Domain
Adding an RSS Feed to Your Blog or Web Site
We'll be launching a Web site and blog for a new client in the next couple of weeks. One of the things the client wanted was to keep their home page fresh by feeding snippets from their blog on a regular basis.
In doing some research into this, it seems there's a number of ways to accomplish this feat, including javascript, PHP, ASP and other solutions. In fact, I found a whole slew of ideas from the ever helpful Robin Good and his post RSS To HTML - How To Convert RSS Feeds Into Published Web Pages - A Mini-Guide.
As Good points out, javascript is perhaps the easiest method to implement an RSS feed on one's Web site, but comes with one caveat: since the javascript code you add doesn't actually include the text from the feed, the search bots don't pick up that content, just the visitor to your page. However, if you're the author of the blog and Web site, I don't see this as a major problem, since your blog is there to warm leads and feed them to your site for conversion.
Good offers a number of free and paid services in his post, and is worth checking out if you're still mulling your options.
We chose Feedburner's BuzzBoost, which is free for all Feedburner accounts, which is also free. Every day I'm more impressed with Feedburner's offerings, and my only concern is that I'm becoming too dependent on them, from their great feed options, their email signups, their feed options, their stats program and more. They were recently purchased by Google, however, so I guess they're not going anywhere.
Using BuzzBoost was easy. A couple of clicks on some configuration items and the javascript was generated. I just need to add the following to any Web page:
<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/FlyteWhatWorksOnline?format=sigpro" type="text/javascript" ></script><noscript><p>Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/FlyteWhatWorksOnline"></a><br/>Powered by FeedBurner</p> </noscript>
And away we go:
If you're looking for a way to drive more traffic to your blog from your Web site or to keep your home page fresh with info, BuzzBoost or one of the other RSS to HTML options is just what you're looking for.
Rich Brooks
Feed Me, Seymour, Feed Me!
What Harry Potter Can Teach Us About Good Web Design
Don't worry, you won't find any spoilers here.
If you've read the Harry Potter series, you know how creative these books are. How the plot twists can dupe even the most experienced readers. How the characters grow and continually surprise us. How the stories are funny, scary, emotional and nerve-racking by turn.
Let me ask you, though:
- What side of the book is the binding on?
- What letters of the alphabet does J.K. Rowling use to tell the story?
- What color are the pages? The print?
- Are the pages sequential?
What's fascinating about Potter isn't the formatting of the book but the ideas within it. So why do so many Web site owners toil under the belief that they need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to Web site design?
Good design is about making your Web site easy for visitors to use...especially ones who are there for the first time. Don't spend your creative juices coming up with a novel method of navigation...it will just frustrate and turn off most of your visitors. Instead, go with a clean, professional design that promotes your business, and use your creative on content that engages and persuades your visitors to take action.
5 Ways to Track Your Online Spending for Maximum Results
Wouldn't it be great to know exactly which Web marketing campaigns were generating sales for you, instead of just site traffic?
If you could easily determine whether it was your blog, or organic search results at AOL, or a paid ad you took out on an email newsletter, that was getting the cash register to ring, would you be interested in finding that out?
Of course you would; if not, you'd be reading Catching Flies, Catching Fish. (And more power to you, BTW!)
By installing and utilizing a free copy of Google Analytics, you can. GA (Google Analytics) allows you to track your incoming links in a number of different ways, allowing you to quickly determine which campaigns are contributing to your bottom line. GA tracks campaigns using a combination of five marketing "dimensions":
- Source: where the traffic comes from; i.e., Google, Yahoo, an email newsletter, another Web site.
- Medium: qualifying the source; i.e., organic search results v. paid search placement.
- Term: the word a person types into the search engine.
- Content: the version of the ad. Best used in content a/b testing; i.e., which version of the ad a person clicked on.
- Campaign: to qualify which campaign the link came from; i.e., "Hot Summer Specials" v. "Back To School Specials."
In a completely unrelated aside, I'll be leading a Working Lunch Seminar entitled "Google Analytics for Online Success" this Wednesday from noon - 1:30 at flyte's offices in Portland, Maine.
Lunch in included, seating is limited, so register online now. (Or just learn more.)
Web Design Horror Stories and How to Avoid Them
The latest issue of BusinessWeek SmallBiz has an article called Web Design Horrors, which reports on some worst case scenarios with bad news vendors. Having had to rescue some clients' Web sites from Web developers who were somewhere between emotionally fragile and psychologically deranged, I know these stories happen all too often.
The article lists six things you can do to protect yourself. (My comments--as a Web developer--follow.)
- Register the domain name yourself, in your name or that of your company. (Couldn't agree more; to quote Seinfeld, you want to be master of your domain. If you have a decent sized company, don't register it under the name of an employee who may not be with you in six months.
- Stay Local. (As a Maine Web designer, posting to MaineToday.com, I couldn't agree more! Actually, we have clients in California all the time, and for the most part it works out fine. We did have one California client who refuses to pay and there's not much I can do. If they were here in Portland it might be a different story. So, I guess it works both ways.)
- Check References. (Well, this is a good idea for just about every business transaction, right? The vendor will give you some, but you should also check their portfolio and follow up with some clients she didn't give you.)
- Get a clause in your contract with the developer explicitly stating that you have the right to use the material on the Web site, to reproduce it, and to distribute it and publicly display or modify it, perpetually and irrevocably. (Nice in theory, but if you or your Web designer purchased some royalty-free imagery, you may not have the right to use it anywhere you like. If you want to, you should make sure that you buy a license for the image that allows you to use it in print or other places you plan on using it.)
- Be as clear as you can about what you expect. (This is true for both sides of the aisle. Often, if this is your first Web site, you may not know the right way to explain what you want. It's a good idea to show examples from other Web sites to better explain what you're hoping to achieve.)
- Ask the developer to produce a shadow site on his own server that you will approve before your site goes live. (If this is the first time you're seeing your site when it's just about ready to go live, you've got problems. A good developer should show you designs for you to approve before they start building the site. At flyte, we have an insane number of checkpoints/signoffs; clients have called us anal to our faces. Our checkoffs include clients must approve the site structure, the finalized content, three rounds of design, sample HTML pages, storyboards of programming (if applicable), the programming itself (again, if applicable), and the final site before we launch it.)
Some of my own suggestions?
- Don't hire your friend/brother-in-law/neighbor's kid. The number of effective business Web sites produced by these people (unless that's their business) can be counted on Homer Simpson's left hand. (He's only got four fingers.) Would you hire any of those people to do your books? To manage your marketing? Just because someone is technically savvy doesn't mean they can produce an effective Web site.
- Ask what they can do to market your site. Web sites no longer market themselves, it takes work. Search engine optimization, email marketing, blogs, etc. Ask what kind of experience they have in these areas and what they can do for you.
- Ask about updates. Who's going to be updating your site, them or you? If you, how will you do it? Are there tools? Do you know HTML? What are the costs for the developer to update your site?
Rich Brooks
Local, Maine Web Designer
The Secret to a Web Site That Sells
When I first got into sales, my boss gave me some sales tapes to listen to in the car. The only one I ever enjoyed was Brian Tracy, I believe it was the Psychology of Sales or something like that. He told the following story.
When plexiglass first came out, one of the best sales people would bring along a pane of plexiglass and a ball-peen hammer. Since people had never seen plexiglass, when the salesman would take the ball-peen hammer to the plexiglass, the prospect would invariably flinch. They were amazed that the product would stand up to that type of impact, and would immediately start buying some.
At the sales conference that year, they asked this salesman what his secret was, he told them. Immediately, all the sales people went out and bought ball-peen hammers.
At the sales conference the following year this salesman was still number one, way ahead of everything else. They asked him again, what he did this year to stay on top. "Well, since I knew everyone else would go out and buy ball-peen hammers, I knew I had to change tactics. So now, when I go into the office of a prospect, I still bring in the hammer and the glass, but now I give the hammer to the prospect. Once the prospect has a go of it with the hammer they have to order a truckload of product."
I'm not sure how true that story was, or how close I got to it since I haven't heard the story from Tracy in over 10 years. However, it stuck with me. Getting the prospect involved with the sales process increases your chance of closing. Period.
In this month's issue of flyte log, our free email newsletter, the subject is The Secret to a Web Site That Sells. Although I've just spilled the secret, I provide a number of ideas that you can use on your own Web site to better engage your visitor, and put the ball-peen hammer in their hands.
Rich Brooks
Maine Web Site Design & Development
Web Site Video: Which Format is Right for You?
As high-speed bandwidth becomes more popular and the cost of storage goes down, it's not surprising that more and more Web site owners are looking to add audio and video to their Web sites.
The question we often get is what format should a site owner use? QuickTime? Windows Media? Real Player? Right now I'd argue that Flash is the way to go for most people. It's got 97% market penetration, the quality is good enough (I've seen better QuickTime movies and Windows Media videos) and it's easy to set up.
Even if you don't own Flash, or don't feel comfortable working with it, there are some nice 3rd party applications that will create the movies for you. I've been playing around with Video2SWF which works for the Mac and the PC.
For the purpose of this experiment I recorded myself using my MacBook Pro's built-in video camera and Conference Recorder 2 by eCamm. I then dragged-and-dropped the file Conference Recorder created into a Video2SWF window, made a couple of changes to the default settings, and hit "export." It created the Flash movie and the html page (which gave me the code I needed to put it in the blog post.)
In any case, I'd love to hear some feedback on the quality of the video, or if you have some other options for both Flash conversion or alternatives to Flash you feel work better.
Free Web 2.0 Handouts to Download
Yesterday I spoke at the Maine Marketing Association's Web 2.0 Conference; my topic was Web Sites for Action! Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink spoke about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Aileen Cahill talked on Online and On Target which talked about the benefits of a Web 2.0 Web site and how to get your customers participating.
It was a great turnout--I'm guessing over 80 people--and there were a lot of good questions for all three presenters. Whether you were able to attend or not, the Maine Marketing Association has posted all three presentations up at their Web site for anyone to download.
PowerPoint handouts (or in my case, Apple's Keynote) are pretty hard to understand if you weren't there for the presentation, so if you review the handouts and still have questions on Maine Web Design or Internet Marketing, please feel free to ask.
What is Web 2.0 Anyway?
If you've been looking for information on Web 2.0 and how you can use it to turbo-charge your Internet marketing, I've got some good news.
The Maine Marketing Association will be putting on Web 2.0 - Internet Strategies for Power Marketing on Monday, May 21st, 2007.
There will be three workshops in this all-morning event:
- Online and On Target - Strategies for One to One Marketing at the Speed of Light by Aileen Cahill, author of Internet Marketing: Building Advantage in a Networked Economy
- Web Design for Action! by Rich Brooks (that's me!)
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink
The festivities begin at 8:30am and will be held at the Ambromson Center in the new Hannaford Hall building.
Registration is $35 for members and students, $45 for everyone else. Pre-registration is appreciated.
Web Site Copywriting: 10 Tips for a More Effective Site
What's the most under appreciated element of a successful site? The copy. Nothing is more important to the success of your Web site--yet more overlooked--than the words on the page.
Writing for the Web is a completely different exercise than writing for printed material. You never know where people are going to start (depends where the search engine drops them), what order they'll read your copy (due to all the links), or how the pages will look (thanks, non-compliant browsers! I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer.) Unfortunately, most Web site owners don't realize this until the 2nd or 3rd iteration of their Web site, if at all.
Thankfully, Susannah Ross has written a great article for old hands and newbies alike called 10 Tips for Building a Better Web Site.
From breaking up your information (#2) to using more verbs (#8) to
anticipating users' questions (#5), she shines a light on issues you
may have overlooked the last time you wrote copy for your site.
If you're Web site isn't delivering the traffic or business you think it should, be sure to check out 10 Tips for Building a Better Web Site. If you need an expert opinion, maybe you need a Web site audit.
Rich Brooks
Maine Web Site Design
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