Social Media for Small to Medium Size Business From Blast creative and Brenda Segna

Social Media Marketing is one of the most valuable tools for small to Medium size businesses. If you aren’t taking advantage of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, then you could be losing sales, potential clients/customers.

Your business needs to be where the people are at and the people are on Facebook and Twitter. According to Mashable.com, Facebook is predicting that their 500 millionth member will join next week. That’s 500 million people that you have an opportunity to network with and market too!

Did you know that you can design your Facebook business page as well as your Twitter page to stay consistent with your brand? It’s true, you can run contests on Facebook, have an enewsletter signup, have an rss feed for your blog, have a shopping cart; the possibilities are endless!

If you are wanting to implement Social Media Marketing for your business, then contact Blast creative and Brenda Segna today! We can assist you with all of your marketing needs as well as design your Facebook and Twitter pages! Take your business to where the people are and let us help your business/network grow!

More Tips for Choosing Your Social Media Name

Choosing your Social Media Moniker is harder than it sounds. You need a name that is broad enough to encompass all you do, yet narrow enough to properly serve your niche. Rushing out and picking a name without giving it careful thought can bring havoc on you later when you find that the name you’ve chosen is already being used, or otherwise no good. I’m writing this article to help you figure out the right name that will serve you long term.

- Choose a name no one else has.
- Choose a name that is no more than 12 characters.
- Don’t try to do too much with your name.
- Use your name if no one else has it.
- Check your name in Twitter, Digg, Facebook.
- Make sure the domain is available for your name in .com and .net.
- Get approval before you use trademark related names or concepts.
- Make your name stand out.
- Use a call to action if possible, ie: “getmoving”
- Use the thesaurus to look up words you want to use.
- Brainstorm different name ideas.


For more information, contact BLaST creative TODAY!

5 Writing Tools No Internet Marketer Should Be Without

Writing compelling content is difficult at the best of times. You have to use a target audience’s hot buttons, emotions, and deepest needs to convince them to buy. But, unless you’ve got a real knack for this type of thing, it just isn’t as easy as it sounds. Thankfully, there are a few tools that can make it a whole lot easier.
Fair Warning: ‘easier’ does NOT mean these tools create ‘foolproof’ copy! (A hammer only works when you miss your finger!)

Once you’ve identified YOUR target audience, you need to learn from them, and who better to learn from than one of them? These Social Networks and searches make it easy to find someone in the perfect target market, learn a bit more about them, gather ideas, and see what the product or service’s competition is up to. You’ll even find it easier to write or sell because you can pretend you’re selling to one of them.

One of the best ways to learn how to write better copy is to practice writing and reading someone else’s sales copy. So, when I find a good piece of copy, I clip it and put it in on my desktop! Then, I can write them out and get to learn how to improve the results of my copy. These bits can also act as a guide while providing you with ideas for handling certain situations. Lastly, it’s also a good idea to keep information about the various products, services, and their competitors as well as examples of good titles and ideas.

ReadPlease

Finding mistakes is tough enough, but things such as awkwardly worded phrases can be almost impossible to find unless someone else reads the copy to you. That’s exactly what ReadPlease does. It’s robotic sounding, but you’d be amazed at how many mistakes you can catch with it.

Whether you choose an online whiteboard, or the more freeing real-life version, writers need a spot to track site structure, concepts, facts, and develop ideas. And with the freedom of a whiteboard, there are no limitations. Trust me, after using one to structure a piece of copy, you’ll wonder how you ever wrote something without it. (It’s also good for jotting down quick notes, but so is Sticky Notes, if you’re interested.)

WYSIWYG, Keyword Analyzer & Email

Off all the tools listed here, I rely on these three the most. The online WYSIWYG makes it pretty easy to code up your text and leaves it nice and clean. The keyword analysis tool is one of the select few online you can use to calculate keyword density simply by copy and pasting.

Your email program can also be extremely helpful. Now, I know you’re going ‘duh’, but it’s actually a great code cleaner. You see, MS Office has a habit of loading text full of useless code that seems almost impossible to get rid of. To fix this problem, email the file to yourself. Then, preview the file in the email program, select the text, copy, and paste it wherever you need it. You’ll find it keeps the HTML without all the junk.

Oh! One last thing! I’m testing out a Firefox addon called ‘After the Deadline’, which is a spelling, grammar, and style checker. You might like it!

Writing Articles for SEO

There has been much speculation about writing articles for SEO or search engine optimization. Writing articles is a GREAT way to get backlinks and drive traffic to your site.

There are a couple of ways that you can utilize this marketing tool. The first is by creating a blog for your site. There is no better "EXPERT" about your business then you. Write what you KNOW!

You can also signup for numerous ezine accounts online. You can publish your articles their and add great backlinks to your site. Remember to use backlinks for every page of your site and not just the home page. Also remember that if you do have a blog that you are using, use backlinks on the blog as well.

One of the biggest things that I see happening with blogs and article submission is that people forget to fill in the little box that says "Keywords."
Keywords are important, this where you want your site and your articles listed under in the search engines. Don't leave this box empty!

If you have social networking accounts, most online ezines have direct feeds to these accounts so that your article can be posted directly to your Facebook, Twitter, etc accounts.

So create your accounts, design your blog and take a few moments to walk back through the backroads of your mind and WRITE what you KNOW!

For more information on article marketing or SEO Services, please contact BLaST creative today!

Monitoring Site Uptime

Site Uptime Monitoring can be done by a variety of services to check websites availability and uptime. What does it mean?

While monitoring your site, These services will periodically query your hosting server to see if it responds readily. These requests are similar to those sent by a Web browser when a common visitor types the URL of your site in the browser address bar and presses "enter" to see one of your Web pages.

These queries are sent from several monitoring centers (to ensure that the error response is really caused by your hosting server downtime, not by connection problems between our monitoring center and your host). The frequency of the monitoring queries depends on the service plan you select and can vary from 5 minutes to 2 hours.

As soon as your server is reported experiencing troubles, our monitoring centers send notifications to the e-mail addresses you specify and start querying your host every minute to find out when the server recovers and calculate the estimated downtime. You may also choose to be sent notifications as soon as the host recovers.

These web monitoring tools are also useful to evaluate time needed for an average visitor to get through to your pages. Actually, when a user's browser sends an HTTP request, this request is routed through many hosts in the Internet before it reaches the destination.

Custom ports monitoring
Usually, traffic flows on the server are organized through different ports, each port being responsible for a separate type of data, most commonly termed as a protocol. HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is one of the most widespread protocols on the Web, through which Web pages are commonly served to the user's browser. As a rule (but not always), port 80 (or 8080) is responsible for the HTTP protocol. Another popular protocol is POP (Post Office Protocol) which uses port 110 by default.

What does all this mean? You can connect to one and the same host (IP address) through different ports to communicate different kinds of data between your machine and the server. If you connect to 129.34.54.674 through the 80 th port, it expects you to request and retrieve Web pages, and if you connect through the 110 th port, it expects you to look for mail messages.

In case your server allows for additional ports to be used in custom purposes (i.e. your hosting package includes the ability to establish your own e-mail accounts on the server), you can monitor the availability of those ports as well.

Speed test
Speed test allows you to immediately check how long it takes either of our monitoring centers to download a certain amount of information from your host (more specifically, how much information could be downloaded in one second to each of the monitoring centers). The higher the connection speed, the more information there is available to download per second.

Content monitoring
The content monitoring option warns you when text (a word or phrase) is missing on a certain page of your site or vice versa, when a certain text you don't want appears on your pages. The first can mean that your content has been changed without your permission (and as such this is an intrusion alert). The second can be used to track the appearance of the error / warning texts (e.g. "Host not found" or "Server busy"). The second also can be used to debug server-side scripts (the alert text may be " CGI script error", "Fatal error" etc).

To summarize all you can use site uptime monitoring to see if you're losing a considerable amount of traffic you have earned as a result of your SEO / SEM campaigns, and decide if your server's performance gives you a reason to change the hosting service. To determine whether your pages are being served slowly and damaging your usability Monitor the DNS resolve and host ping average speed, as well as content download speed, to find out whether your pages appear slower than they should to the average visitor, thus damaging the overall usability grade of your site.

For more information on Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing and Web Design, please contact BLaST creative today!

BLaST Creative Web Design

There are very few web sites if any in today’s market that don’t use images. And most commercial sites use images accompanied with FLASH.

I will even go as far as betting that there are waaay more images present on a typical website than you realize. Because HTML was created to share academic papers, anything more detailed on intense than simple text or a web even a web form has to use an image. At BLaST Creative Web Design, we’ve even used an image in place of text for the heading, because it provides us with more control over the fonts as well as positioning.

Even using some text can really be created into an image making it easier to use. Background images in a web page can be tiled or repeated horizontally, vertically or in both directions.

Next there are lists and what do you do with them? I imagine that you’ve used bullets points or numbers in your word documents and in web design this is similar.

There are three applications for lists in HTML:

• Unordered lists (bullet points)
• Ordered lists (numbered lists)
• Definition lists (used to define words or phrases like those found in a dictionary)

Lists can be helpful when you wish to group segments of data together visually. If the segments of data weren’t in any specific order, for example, a list of favorite websites, then you would use an unordered list. But, if the list were of your top ten favorite sites, then you’d use a numbered or ordered list.

Definition lists aren’t really used that much, but they can be great if your site has a glossary.

At BLaST Creative Web Design, we utilize lists to group together segments of data that are related, it makes more sense to group related information links into a list. However, for aesthetic reasons you may not always want your data to have bullet points.

This is where CSS can be quite helpful. Just because something appears in the HTML as a list, it doesn’t need to look like a set of bullet points. You can use CSS to style a list to look any way that you choose. You can use pictures or images in place of bullets or as bullets, you are only limited by your imagination, you can style you data to look any way that you’d like.

BLaST Creative SEO Services and SEO Copywriting

One of the first things that you probably notice when you visit a website is that there are lots of words on them that are used for navigation, in logos and as headlines. BLaST Creative SEO copywriting is the name of the game when it comes to forming web site content like product descriptions, blogs and article marketing.

Content Is The Name of The Game

For any website the content is the most important aspect of the site by far. For a news website, it's not only important to have a great design, but people go there to read the articles, so content is key. A car dealership, people want to see cars, but they also want to read content about the dealership and their philosophy. If your site is not up to snuff, your site will struggle to get visitors back.

If a customer comes to your site to read an article or a product description,it's important that they can read the copy easily. Use a reasonable size font on a plain or a light colored background. This will also make your pages easier to print.

BLaST Creative Copywriting Headings

Headings help your visitors scan a web page to decide if they want to read your body content. You need to split the content in to manageable sections and can be used by blind people using screen readers to navigate the web pages. Headings, if used correctly, also help search engines to index your web page.

How XHTML Handles Headings

In a printed document, like a newspaper or brochure, you can use headings whenever you feel like it. However, since web pages are written using XHTML you have to use them in a certain way.

XHTML has six levels of headings. The main page heading uses an h1 and should be near the top of the page. There are then five levels of subheadings from h2 to h6.

Remember headings are used to help the reader scan the page. Each sub-heading should break the page down into smaller sections of information.

If your page is "BLaST Creative Web Design", that should be your main heading (h1). You could then have (h2) sub headings on Search Engine Marketing, Web Site Design, Logo Design, and Graphic and Web Design and (h3) on another section that you want to break down the copy.

Each time you're breaking the page into smaller, more specific sections. So, if your visitors want to go straight to your portfolio, they can with one click without having to read all of your BLaST Creative content.

BLaST Creative Web Design

In our world of advanced technology web design can be done cheaply, you can purchase templates that have already been designed and in matter of a few hours have a page up and representing your business. Or you could utilize the services of reputable design studio like BLaST Creative Web Design and rest assured that you have a unique design that was created just for you.

Your web site is the front door of your business, web design is everything, yes it may cost a little more to receive a well designed site, but you want to put your best foot forward for your customer.

You want people to come back to your site, to come to your business, you want to be original and unique. You want them to be hooked by web site design so that they will walk into your business or purchase your product.

Do you have a logo? A logo can help to identify who you are, it provides people with instant recognition. Having a logo on you marketing applications as well as your site can assist in promoting your web site.

Do you have an advertising budget? Consider splitting your advertising budget and adding web marketing to your list. Do some pay per click advertising, press releases, and blogging. These call all add to you web site, increase revenue and provide you with a better ROI on your investment, which of course include the little extra that you paid to have quality web design for your site.

Well that's all for this week, come back next week and learn more about web design brought to you by BLaST Creative Web Design.

BLaST Creative Web Design

Here are some more key points that you should take into consideration when designing a web site. A key element to keep in mind is that the most popular web sites are always rich in content.

Stay on task with your subject. Don't try to be all things to all people. It's a good idea to write down the goal of your site before starting any design work. It will help you make designs for the site as a whole. Keep your goal in mind.

Creating a web site can be challenging and fun. The temptation to put as many bells and whistles as you can on a page can be overwhelming. But unless your site is involved with bells and whistles, don't do it! The purpose of designing a site carefully is not to make it look cool or win awards. It's to accomplish the intended goal of the site.

Remember that with anything in life, first impressions count! Think about the message you are sending to your customer. The first page of your web site should be a concise description of the website. Don't make this page too busy, you want to give your visitors the desire to dig deeper into your site through the use of inviting text and interesting graphics. If you are serious about your business, buy your own domain name and don't use a "free" hosting service.

Design sites, not pages. Your primary concern should be the site's overall design. When starting to design a new site from scratch, you should try to create a design that will make sense to users, has a consistent look and feel, and is not to difficult to extend in the future. The consistency of design of a site is one of the factors that differentiate amateur sites from professional ones.

Make it easy to get around your site. Your customer should be able to easily navigate to any page on your web site from any page on your site. It's important to link in a consistent, well thought out manner that users can learn to navigate. Have clear links to your pages and, if you are selling a product, make it easy for people to buy it! Make sure that your contact page can be reached from every page. Invite customers to contact you with their questions or comments. Add links to other sites only if it’s necessary, or on a special links page at the end of your site. You want visitors to go through your site before surfing off to another!

View your site through the eyes of a stranger. Once you have completed your site outline, view it in other browsers. Does it look like you wanted it to look?
Don't forget to tell the world about your new site. Make sure that your URL is on all your company business cards, letter heads, brochures, phone systems, etc. Swap links with other related web sites and consider banner advertising. List your site with the major search engines, but read their rules of submission first!

Keep your site current. Come up with a reason for people to visit and revisit your pages and recommend them to their friends. Blogs are a really good way to keep your content relevant. Other words most likely to attract visitors are: Free and Special. Be sure you offer something of value if you use these words!

Survey says... Ask users about your site. Create a survey and give a reward for responding. Ask friends to check out the site, and then grill them on what they thought about it. This can be valuable input on what improvements are needed. Often, things a designer might never see as a problem can throw users. Don't ever stop looking for ways to improve your website. Subscribe to professional E-zines, and keep surfing the web doing market research. What are your competitors doing better? Ask for feedback from your friends, relatives and customers. They will often see things with fresh eyes.