Some handy uses why I use Google Alerts:

• monitoring a press release I posted about my business or myself
• monitoring a press release that I might have been part of that somebody else published
• monitoring when Google indexes my blog posts 
• monitoring who’s linking to my website and what are they saying (this is kind of sneaky)
• monitoring who else is talking about my business and what are they saying (you can patrol
• monitoring who might be stealing your content)
• monitoring and staying current on a competitors (this can be fun)

http://www.google.com/alerts

Here’s the email I get whenever my name or my business name get’s indexed by Google. This can give you a lot of insight into how often you come up in conversation online.

Think about what type of company you are comfortable working with before you meet with them. If they give an answer outside of your comfort level tell them immediately. Some businesses don’t mind working with startups or individuals with lesser experience if the price is right. Everyone has to start somewhere, but if this is a risk you are not willing to take just tell the developer.

2 ) Can I see current online examples of your work? Website Designs, Email Marketing Campaigns, Social Media Marketing Setup and Management…etc

This is a must have for any developer. Make sure they have actual websites you can review on your own computer at any time you want. Avoid designers that only show you their work in other formats besides online such as printed collateral. Most developers will be happy to meet with you and review their current and past client work.  

3 ) What other services can you provide?

You never know what other services they may be able to provide unless you ask. It is often easier on you and can build a stronger brand identity if one company or designer can handle multiple aspects of your marketing. Ask them about direct marketing, email marketing, and natural search optimization services.

4 ) Do you have testimonials from other clients?

Reputable designers and developers will happily provide a list of satisfied clients, both past and present. Ask for a list of references to contact direct for a follow up.

5 ) I have a budget. Can I see examples of your work that fall within specific price ranges?

The developer should be able to supply a range of web design examples and online campaigns that where developed within general price ranges or tiers. This will also give you a perspective of the value of the end product being developed for you and your business. You can also request quotes from multiple developers to see a general average in pricing, but beware that the cheapest price might not be your best solution – reason why you ask for examples, testimonials…etc.

6 ) Do you register domain names and provide hosting?

Ask very specific questions about where the site will be hosted. In my professional opinion, host with a third party and keep all information in your name or your businesses name. Do not let a developer register your domain name or hosting in their name. All of that information is the property of you and your business and should always remain that way. Reputable third party hosts include: GoDaddy, Dreamhost, Bluehost, Rackspace…etc.

7 ) What is your process for designing and developing a website?

A well outlined plan or process ensures you and your vendor know each other’s respective roles in the design and development of your website. It also will help you gauge their level of experience. Beware of developers who do not deliver a timeline for milestones during the development phase. Ask your developer to sit down and review the proposed process and ask any questions that are unclear.

8 ) What programming languages and development tools do you use?

Even though you may not care about the answer to this question, it is important information for you to know. At the very least they should be able to hand code html. Other acceptable languages are PHP, ASP, XHTML, CSS, AJAX and javascript.

9 ) What is the change process after the website is finished?

At some point your website, no matter how great it is, will need some changes or updates made. Find out what the process is for having these changes made. One way to avoid having to work with your vendor for content updates is to see if they will implement a content management system on your website.

10 ) Who owns the finished product at the end of the contract?

There is only one acceptable answer here. No matter what, the client owns the website including all graphics and content. The only exception is if your website uses a content management system. Often the CMS is outlined in your contract with the vendor as belonging to the vendor as their intellectual property.

1. Express who you are: A new backdrop can really help people understand who you are as a business and an individual. I use my background to display my business but I also ‘sprinkle’ in a few things about me personally… for example, my love for cooking, my passion for outdoor photography and how all of those things tie back into who I am as a business and a business owner.

2. Additional contact: It’s an easy way to add additional information that you might not be able to plug into your 160 character bio.

3. What’s your brand: Having your contact information, your face, or additional bio information within your background is a common practice. It helps potential followers understand what you do, why you are someone people should follow and how to contact you direct.

4. Why not… it’s fun: It’s really another platform to show off your creativity and style. I use Twitter to showcase more I Love Nevada photography. I change the background images out once every couple of weeks to keep it fresh and entertaining. Follow me on Twitter.

To learn more about how to design and setup a custom Twitter background, give me a call at 626-8330.

Top 18 Featured WordPress Sites

View Westward Strategy’s WordPress Client Showcase

1. Elect Ken Stover
www.Electstover.com

2. Contract Medical Billing
www.ContractMedicalBilling.com

3. Nevada Foodies
www.NevadaFoodies.com

4. Bartlett Architecture
www.ArchitectReno.com

5. Gary Cardinal Law Office
www.CardinalLawReno.com

6. 7Q10 (formerly Huffman & Carpenter)
www.7Q10.com

7. Bidart & Ross, Inc.
www.Bidart-Ross.com

8. Paramount Bedding
www.pbmattress.com

9. Recycled Furniture
www.recycledfurniturereno.com

10. Susan Hill PR
www.SusanHillPR.com

11. The Gold ‘N Silver Inn
www.GoldnSilverReno.com

12. Koonce Consulting
www.KoonceConsulting.com

13. Lyman PR
www.LymanPR.com

14. Reno Big Band
www.RenoBigBand.org

15. WETLAB – Western Environmental Testing Laboratory
www.Wetlaboratory.com

16. Westward Strategy & Design Group
www.WestwardStrategy.com

17. Kristy Crabtree
www.KristyCrabtree.com

18. Sports Attack (former client)
www.sportsAttack.com

19. Johnson-Perkins & Associates
(Coming Soon)

 20. American Housekeeping of Northern Nevada
(Coming Soon)

Westward Strategy, a Reno web design company, has the capability of customizing a web solution for you and your business … most importantly without loss of quality and with your budget in mind. Call Kristy for a solution that fits your needs (775) 626-8330.

Blog or use it as a Content Management System, WordPress is the next best cost effective web solution.

No need to purchase additional software, your site is accessible wherever there’s internet connectivity and most importantly, you own it. No monthly leasing payments.

There are also hundreds of Free and inexpensive WordPress Themes available to choose from that represent several business styles such as: Magazine Editorial, Corporate, and Creative, Retail, Technology, Nonprofit, entertainment and more. You can make simple changes to represent your brand and brand messaging without having a fully custom built website. Example: http://themeforest.net/category/wordpress/

The WordPress administrative area is easy to use to make updates to both your posts and pages. Posts are listed in reverse chronological order and are also displayed in RSS feeds. Pages are static and not listed by date.  Your navigation is typically referencing a static page; whereas your posts reference the latest information sorted by date.

WordPress also keeps costs of having a dynamic website minimal because of the long lists of plugins that are available to customize your needs. There are ecommerce plugins, fundraising plugins, social media plugins, All-in-One SEO plugins, sitemap plugins, gallery plugins, calendar plugins, event plugins and more.  Example: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/browse/popular/.

Take a look at WordPress as a solution for your business or non-profit. View their Showcase and the many businesses and non-profits that are currently using WordPress as their choice for a publishing platform.

Non-profit Examples

• Walk to Washington
• Joint Use
• American Red Cross Online Disaster News Portal
• Philadelphia Neighborhoods
• Boys and Girls Club of the Midlands
• BigGovHealth
• More Examples

You can download WordPress for free http://wordpress.org/download/.

——————————————————————–

If you would like to learn more about WordPress as a solution for your Reno Business or Reno Non-profit, please give Westward Strategy a call at (775) 626-8330.

Testimonials are and should be considered true marketing if they are written honestly, with real facts and the ability for new business to contact your references direct if needed. They provide the much-needed ‘proof’ for waivering prospects and can be used to convert more easily if given the ability and access.

It’s easy to sell myself and make the promise that I have your businesses best interest in the forefront of my mind but it can be an up hill battle to sing my own praises when I have competitors that might brow beat me simply by price.

Inorder to be able to compete in such a saturated and competitive marketplace here are four tips for how I make honest and competitive use of testimonials:

1) Westward doesn’t over-edit. Our testimonials work best when they are in real people language. The real written language helps our readers connect which demonstrates that we are an honest company looking out for our clients each and every day.

2) Westward uses testimonials that fit. We place appropriate testimonials along with a particular point that we are trying to make and back it up with facts. Call us on it if you want. We’d be happy to deliver the information.

3) Westward never fakes it. While testimonials are crucial, we don’t take the risk to fake them. We figured that most people have well-trained ‘this is a crock’ detector and they can smell a fake a mile away. If you would like a list of our references – contact me direct: info@westwardstrategy.com.

4) Westward always encourages specifics. Whether a client gives us a testimonial on their own or whether we ask them for one, we do ask our clients to be specific on how Westward helped them. Wouldn’t you want to know exactly what we did as far as specifics for the client rather than a bland – yeah Westward Strategy was great cause they just were!

Read ‘real‘ accounts of how Westward Strategy has been an asset to clients by visiting the testimonials page, my Linked in page or any of my local associations: Better Business Bureau, eWomen Network, Sparks Chamber of Commerce or the Reno Sparks Chamber of Commerce.

Cornerstone Blogs

For many businesses blogging has become the cornerstone of their web marketing efforts, a way to disseminate information and reach their target demographic/potential client base in a new way. It allows for dialogue with their clients, albeit still in a top down fashion. The business pushes content down and the masses respond. They could respond in many ways including comments, linkbacks or tweets and retweets. Many businesses use it as a test bed for customer service and/or marketing messages, but there is one overriding characteristic of these blogs. They all add value to the company’s brand image by being useful and providing quality information to their users.

At Westward Strategy we strive to add value every single time we post something. Sure, sometimes we post our own business successes, but more often than not we post the successes of our clients over our own successes. We do research and find supporting and/or opposing arguments to the topic we are writing on. We even publish articles that could be useful to anyone looking for search optimization or web design resources. And we do all of it with the readers/users of our site at the forefront of our minds. If you’re shopping around for a web design firm we hope you can use and/or educate yourself a little bit more with our “10 Questions You Should Ask a Prospective Web Design Company“. It does not matter if you choose to contact us about your project or not.

Now I know what you are saying…

“Chris, if a company uses a blog to publish quality content and that in turn garners more market share and value for the company, isn’t that self-serving?”

The answer – sure, in a way. The difference is cornerstone blogs focus on the customer first and the business second.

Self-serving Blogs

The other type of blog is the self-serving blog. The blog that gets added to an existing website and updated maybe once a month with posts that read something like this:

Reno Car Wash has the best reno car washes in Reno. We use only the best car wash soap and reno car wash equipment at Reno Car Wash. You should stop by Reno Car Wash and see our brand new car wash equipment and get a car wash from Reno Car Wash while you’re there!

Or even worse, they look like this with a bazillion links in them:

Reno Car Wash has the best reno car washes in Reno. We use only the best car wash soap and reno car wash equipment at Reno Car Wash. You should stop by Reno Car Wash and see our brand new car wash equipment and get a car wash from Reno Car Wash while you’re there!

Ok, that may be a little exaggerated, but trust me it’s not by much. It should be painfully obvious, like a frying pan to the skull cap, what the difference is between a cornerstone blog and self-serving blog. Sure the self-serving blog will manage to get information to the user that may be of some use, but really is that the way you talk to your customers? Is that the way you should talk to your customers? The answer to both is NO.

Self-serving blogs are like cheap furniture. They may have a nice wood veneer, but one scratch will reveal the shoddy construction and cheap materials underneath that thin cover. At that point it doesn’t matter what you put into the blog, you or your company will be seen in a not-so-friendly light.

So, the question is, why do you blog? Are you adding value for your clients, customers and website users? Are you helping educate them? Are you freely giving information and knowledge? Or are you posting for your own perceived benefit? Are you blogging to dominate the search results? (See SEO Myth: Blogging Means Top Rankings) Are you adding value or just creating white noise?

Why do you blog?

Rand’s article raises some valid points about the SEO industry. Now that other forms of advertising and sales channels have slipped up a bit due to their high costs or lower ROI, online marketing – including SEO, is taking more of the marketing budget pie in a lot of corporate environments. Internal marketing departments and external marketing agencies are having to prove their worth more, now that budgets are getting stretched and squeezed to their fullest. If a channel isn’t accountable for spending vs. sales then the likelihood that it will survive this downturn is unlikely.

Also, SEO is coming out of the shadows. As myths get debunked and education is expanded to business owners and marketers, true SEO is gaining ground as a viable marketing initiative. Of course there are still gamers, hacks and snake oil salesmen out there and until our industry grows up a lot more and sets some standards the fight will rage on between white hat and black hat SEO.

On the other side of the fence Ms. Callow discusses the benefits of search marketing or PPC advertising. Which is one arena where we have seen tremendous growth in the last several months. Of course a majority of this growth can be attributed to the holiday season, as we handle pay per click advertising for several online retailers. However it is not just retailers looking to leverage this channel over traditional advertising – many of our b2b customers have been asking about it as well. I believe Ms. Callow nails the reasoning for this perfectly in her article.

Often marketers are attracted to PPC advertising due to its inherent benefits such as advanced targeting, accountability and cost effectiveness. With PPC advertising you can start or stop ads at any time, run them only when you know people will be looking for your product or service, target by geographic region (down to the city level) and attract customers using their nomenclature at the exact instance of their interest and query. With advanced web analytics you can track click to conversion metrics to further account for each dollar spent vs. each dollar generated.

There is also a “safe” factor to PPC advertising. Marketers know that they can invest a minimal amount upfront and give it a test run. If they feel it is not working for them they can stop all ads and outgoing costs instantly or they can retool ads and spend more time doing keyword research to find better converting terms. Right now these are especially attractive features.

Don’t Stop at SEO and PPC Advertising

The only thing both of these articles are missing is any mention of other online marketing initiatives, like permission based email marketing. Email marketing is still a tremendous way to market on a very cost effective platform. It literally costs pennies, and in most cases fractions of pennies, to leverage an internal customer or lead list that may be gathering dust and turn it into a powerful customer relationship management channel and sales tool.

So if you are not already involved in online marketing, you better get your move on! You are already losing ground, market share and revenue to your competitors if you are not actively working the online channel. In all market conditions it is a powerful marketing tool, but especially during an economic downturn.

Enough websites, business periodicals, and newspapers have written about the benefits of business blogging that business owners and marketing managers with little to no experience with internet marketing have latched onto it as the holy grail of search engine optimization. Those in the business of web development and SEO have not helped matters at all. They continue to push the easy sale of business blogging on every client that walks through their door even though some businesses just have no reason to blog. Other businesses simply have no time to blog. Believe me blogging is time consuming as is often the first thing in our office to get neglected when we get outrageously busy. If you don’t have the time to manage your regular website do you think you will have time to blog as well?

Beyond the question of whether or not your business should have a blog lies the fact that blogging is not the holy grail of search engine optimization. There is no holy grail of SEO. There is no one thing you can invest minimal time in to achieve top rankings. It takes a considerable investment of time, either your own or that of an internet marketing consultant, in all of the items mentioned at the beginning of this article – link building, article marketing, social media marketing, website usability improvements, on-page content optimization and more in order to get top rankings for your chosen keywords.

Many web designers tout blogs as automagically having search engine optimized structure and code. This is a flat out fallacy. On-page optimization is dependent upon the SEO knowledge of the developer and/or designer. I have seen plenty of blogs with horrible on-page optimization. Even prepackaged free templates can suffer from under-optimized structure and leaving the blog engine’s default settings in place is virtually always an SEO killjoy. (Even our blog is not as optimized as it could be. Feel free to comment on it.)

Are we completely against business blogging? Of course not!! If we were, would we have a blog? We know that blogging can be a very powerful tool in any business’s online marketing arsenal. It is a great way to communicate directly and openly with your customers and potential customers. Blogs can give clarity as to what you or your product does and they can help greatly with online reputation management and customer service. They can even help garner good rankings for long tail terms and phrases related to your main keyword list, but it is not the only thing you, as a site owner, should be doing to create a powerful online identity. Most importantly, business blogging is not the holy grail of search engine optimization.

You can shift your marketing dollars away from traditional print and direct marketing to internet marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and PPC advertising. As we say on our solutions page, your website is the core to all your marketing initiatives. It is the only marketing tool that gives you direct, almost real-time, feedback of marketing campaigns. No more guesstimates as to how that direct mail campaign went or how many people even saw your ad in the yellow pages, let alone called you because of it.

With the tracking and analytics capabilities of the internet you know almost instantaneously how well your marketing collateral, ad buys, or email campaign was received. You get real numbers allowing you to understand where you should invest more or curtail other initiatives. If you are not receiving statistical data from your web development company, internet marketing firm, or email marketing agency you should probably seek additional vendor help in those areas.

Now more than ever it is critical to be strategic with your marketing dollars. It’s time you know exactly where your marketing dollars are going and exactly what you are getting for them. Return on your investment (ROI) can be determined almost immediately and there is no guessing. Can you say the same about your last print ad campaign?

Not only can you be more strategic with internet marketing, but you can also claim you’re going green! By not running print ads your business is not using the paper to print the direct mail pieces or using the toxic and environmentally unfriendly inks used in printing those items like postcard mailers or newspaper ads. Some people in the print industry or more traditional graphic design agencies may want to argue the validity of that statement, but stop and think about every aspect of creating and delivering a single direct mail piece. If you compare the total process from creating the ink, making the paper, printing the item and then delivering the item,with the alternative of using electrical energy to keep the ad servers up and running you can see the environmental impact for online marketing is dramatically lower than many other advertising options.

With online marketing, not only can you feel warm and fuzzy inside about doing your part to save the planet, but your wallet will also feel good. Because online marketing does not use those physical, natural resources it does not carry the same high cost as print advertising. When you hire an internet marketing firm you are paying for their time, energy, and effort to create your digital ad. You do not have to pay for the ink company to create the ink or the paper company to create the paper or the printer to print the creative piece – all those items that get built into the cost of doing direct mail. Instead your budget can be put towards what is most important – creating powerful ads that drive real customers to your door! Isn’t that the point of marketing in the first place?!?

When things look to be getting tougher many businesses immediately start to slash and burn their marketing budgets – one of the worst things to do in these times. You don’t want to bury your head in the sand and wait out the storm while your competitors expand their branding and advertising online. Instead you should contact an internet marketing consultant to help you put your marketing dollars to better use.