Take a Fresh Look Blog

Call it Mommy Brain...

2011-06-10T20:46:27Z

Some people may think that there's not a place in professional lives for personal details. Sure, sometimes that's true. But what happens when you're existing in a space where there's no way to separate the two?

Last summer, I discovered I would be bringing on a new team member to join our Fresh Look Creative team in 2011. His first day was March 1, 2011, and can I say he's just the cutest little CEO??

I gave myself permission to take a week off when he arrived, and committed myself to being back to work (working from home- I'm not THAT ambitious) the following week.

I'm not sure if I was delirious when I set this lofty goal, but I certainly wasn't thinking clearly. The first week Mr. CEO was home, I cried a good portion of the time, unable to figure out how I was ever going to work and devote the amount of time to him that he required. As I saw it, I was failing on all fronts.

And in reality, I was failing, because I didn't give myself permission to give Mr. CEO the time he needed. And I didn't make the arrangements on a business front to have a GOOD amount of time off. So Mr. CEO suffered, and so did my business.

It wasn't until well into Mr. CEO's 2nd month that I finally felt normal enough to take a breath and start working again. (This aligned well with Mr. CEO's agreeing to sleep through the night.)

Yesterday, I tweeted for the first time in a long time, and today I make my first blog post. I could apologize for the extended hiatus, but instead I think I'll just blame Mommy Brain, because that's what it was. We mother entrepreneurs can aim to do it all, and in fact must realize that there's a rhythm to every part of life. Just because we can't find time to tweet between breast-feeding doesn't mean we'll never tweet again! And just because we let Mr. CEO test out his lungs as we finish blogging doesn't mean we're bad mommies.

Welcome back to the Fresh Look Creative blog. I hope your work is as ever-evolving as mine is, because we're better business people for it.

Tricky Advertising and Marketing

2010-08-06T19:54:17Z

*Do not misconstrue any of the following as legal advice. Always consult with a licensed attorney when you have specific questions regarding statements made in your business advertising.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, and non-profit public interest group, has brought a lawsuit against Coca-Cola, claiming that the company's vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims. (Read about the details here.)

The really interesting part is that Coca-Cola's defense is this: "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage." Uh, really, Coca-Cola? I don't know if it's the word "vitamin" or the word "water" that is more misleading, but nevertheless, there you have it. Coca-Cola doesn't even try to deny the claims that the beverage is unhealthy (in truth, the drink has 33 grams of sugar in it.)

So the question becomes: where you should you, a small business owner, draw the line in your marketing?

While you may never be as large as Coca-Cola, small business owners get themselves in hot water every day by making false or misleading claims in their advertising. There can be some stiff consequences, not the least of which is some possible nasty publicity.

Often forgotten is something as simple as coupons, commonly used by businesses large and small. If you take a look at a large corporation coupons, you'll notice something common among every one of them -- fine print. That's the lawyers keeping the corporations out of a hot mess. So why wouldn't you, a small business owner, take the same precautions? No, it's not silly. The reason that you see statements such as "Cannot be used in combination with any other offer" and "One per customer" and "Expires XX/ XX/ XXXX" and "Only applies to basic service, not super-duper deluxe service" is because someone has tried to pull any and all of these shenanigans before. The basic rule is that if a restriction is not stated clearly and simply on your coupon, then you will need to comply with any customer requests in regards to the coupon.

The same goes with your advertising. If you are offering a special promotion, you can very simply state on all print advertising "Rules and restrictions can be found on our website at www.ourwebsite.com." Then, add a page to your site with borderplate regulations, with specifications made to fit your promotion. It's an extra step that you should take, because as soon as you don't, you'll get burned.

The thing is, people don't like to be tricked. As soon as you appear deceitful, people will get ticked. In Coca-Cola's situation, understandably, some people believed that they were being healthy by partaking in vitaminwater. (It's not a huge stretch, based on the product name, even though I personally think people need to read labels!)

Be as honest as you can when it comes to your marketing. This can be difficult because, after all, most advertising could be labeled as "slick" and "tricky". But at the end of the day, if you're honest with your clients and customers, they'll thank you for it, and you'll be more likely to earn their repeat business.

Google vs. Bing and Yahoo

2010-06-25T20:33:53Z

I have a confession. I'm a Google addict. There's really no cure- I Google just about everything. Seems everyone else is afflicted as well, so I haven't really considered this a problem. Until yesterday.

Let's back up- with the emergence of Bing, we digital marketers had another search engine to worry about. To tell the truth, I've watched my analytics and really not seen any action on the Bing front. So when clients and I would discuss different search engines, I didn't fight their mindset that as long as we optimized a site for Google, we'd be fine.

But we've known that Yahoo and Bing will be merging at some point, and upon viewing this video, which details why we need to start thinking about Bing searches, I decided to take a deeper look. I've pulled statistics for one of my client's sites to show you what I found.

	Visits	Pages/ Visit	Avg. Time on Site	Bounce Rate	Overall % of traffic
Google	5,728	3.07	3:24	42.98%	55.69%
Yahoo!	273	2.85	3:33	58.24%	2.65%
Bing	302	3.7	4:16	31.46%	2.94%

This is a glimpse at our client's traffic directly from search engines for the month of June. You'll see that Google definitely drives the significant traffic.

However, take a look at the Pages/ Visit column for Bing. You'll see that more of the site's pages on average are viewed by Bing visitors. Additionally, look at the Avg. Time on Site for Bing. Visitors directed to this site from Bing are spending more time on the site. Does this mean that Bing is catering to more serious shoppers? Better researchers? All I know is that I want visitors to spend as much time as possible on my client's site- they're more likely to make a purchasing decision that way!

One other interesting statistic- look at the Bing Bounce Rate. It is significantly less than both the Google and Yahoo bounce rate.

I'll show you one other example from a different website.

	Visits	Pages/ Visit	Avg. Time on Site	Overall % of traffic
Google	3,111	2.07	1:21	25.32%
Yahoo!	268	2.38	1:17	1.86%
Bing	2,828	2.32	1:01	19.66%

This one shocked me a bit. These are search engine statistics from the last year (June 26, 2009-June 25, 2010). Look at the Visits number! The Bing visits for this site almost match those of Google!! While the other statistics aren't quite as significant, all of the other sites that I examined had only 3.65-4.2% of their overall web traffic from the last year coming from Bing, and this site is rocking it at 19.66%!!

While research is still emerging about Bing SEO, I'm certainly convinced that it's no longer appropriate to brush Bing aside. Let me know if you have questions about how you can dive into your analytics to discover what Bing's doing with your site.

If Your Site Has Flash...

2010-06-04T19:44:43Z

We've designed a few websites here and there, and they range from the simple and informative to sites with flash and video. We try our best to make sure that the sites we design are specifically purposed for our clients, so they aren't paying for features they don't need and their site visitors won't use. We also try to steer our clients clear of site elements that may be a detriment to their optimization or simply an annoyance for users (hello, splash pages!! If you've still got a splash page on your site, get rid of it. Like, now...)

There's been an ongoing debate in the development world for the last 3-4 weeks revolving around Apple technology and Adobe software. You can read a few articles about the issues here, and also see the letter that Apple CEO Steve Jobs penned in April regarding Adobe software.

Here's the long and short of it: Flash, an Adobe product, doesn't function on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Rather, it might function fine, but Apple doesn't allow Flash on these products.

So, if you have a website, you need to be aware that when your website is accessed with an iPhone, iPod or iPad, any Flash elements will not be visible to these users. This means that you have a decision to make.

You could remove all Flash elements so that your site is functional for all users (but this is undesireable to a lot of site owners since most paid a pretty penny for the Flash functionality.)
You could do nothing. If Flash is just an aesthetic part of your site and doesn't affect functionality, a user accessing your site with an iPod, iPad or iPhone won't really notice that the Flash is 'missing'.
If you're running a huge site, some organizations have opted to create alternate pages that appear when an iPod, iPad or iPhone operating system is detected.
Or, as Steve Jobs suggests, you could utilize HTML5, CSS and JavaScript for your site programming. Jobs says:

HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash).

If your site functionality relys heavily on Flash, now is the time to start thinking about a game plan. If you have Google Analytics installed on your site, you can actually dig down and determine how much of your site traffic is accessing your site via iPad, iPod or iPhone. For assistance in finding this information within your analytics reports, shoot us an email or give us a call.

Facebook Facts You Didn't Know

2010-05-13T16:34:23Z

[Source: Online PhD Programs for MashableMashable.com]

FLC at Pubcon

2010-04-14T17:43:52Z

I've been at Pubcon South 2010/ Dallas today, and will be here again tomorrow, learning cool new ninja tricks to help my clients' businesses. Pubcon is an amazing conference with emphasis on SEO, social media and a bunch of other dorky stuff.

I wanted to share some cool advice that I've received thus far today, because I'm filled to brim and about to burst with great ideas.

From Ted Ulle with Converseon, an awesome point was made. He said that too often, companies design their websites like applications. There's a difference between websites and applications. Application users are willing to LEARN about an application because they purchased it. Your website users are NOT willing to take time to learn how to use your website. It's ridiculous to think that a user would spend more than 5-10 seconds looking for information when they could very easily go to your competitor's site and have a much better experience.

Additionally, you should never design a website for YOUR use. Rather, design your site for your user. Bring in a few random folks, treat them to a cup of coffee and ask questions. "If you were trying to find a widget, where would you look on my site for information about said widget?" "Oh really? You'd look under 'Products' instead of 'Services'?" Once you figure out how someone completely unrelated to your business would use your site, you'll have a much better idea of how your site information architecture should flow.

Another really good thought was from Scott Stratten of Un-Marketing. His point was that you should not have a presence within the social media conversation if you don't want to or intend to be present. That is to say that you should NOT have a Twitter account, or a Facebook page or a blog, if you do not use them. Nothing looks worse than someone happening upon or finding your blog and discovering a single three line post from 2 years ago. This is the equivalent of you shrugging your shoulders and saying "Eehhh. I really don't care that much to communicate with this potential customer."

Looking forward to sharing more about what I learn here! To follow my ongoing tweets about what's happening here at Pubcon, check out the Fresh Look Creative tweet feed here.

Sacrificing for Social Media Glory

2010-04-12T15:03:06Z

We design logos. Did you know that? We're a marketing company, so maybe you just assumed that we offered this service. Well, you assumed correct! We've done our share of brand creation, but this is not a blog post about OUR brand creation services, so read on...

We've started doing some work for a client who's number one goal is to get his company's site to the top of Google for a certain keyphrase. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and we continue to look for ways to edge closer and closer to this goal. One of our first initiatives was to integrate social media for this client. Google now indexes Facebook and Twitter postings, so it was important for our client to be found in these places.

About a month ago, I discovered an opportunity for a client that made me both jump for joy and swallow my pride. You may have heard of the innovative company I Wear Your Shirt (I actually blogged about these guys many months ago...) Very simply, you send them your shirt, and they wear it. Well, maybe not that simply: you pay them to wear it. And then they blog about it, Tweet about it, create video posts about it, etc. As I've told you before, I love good ideas. And this was a great one. In March, I Wear Your Shirt partnered with two designers and launched I Design Your Logo. Aside from the fact that I wished I'd thought of the idea, I was ecstatic.

We'd just started working with For Sale By Owner Homes, a flat fee MLS listing company, and this was a great way to increase their social media impact AND get a new logo designed for them. Also incredibly intriguing is the pricing structure used by both I Wear Your Shirt and I Design Your Logo. You would pay $2 on the first fiscal day, and the price increases by $2 each day. So, we paid $86 for today, April 12 (I Design Your Shirt's fiscal year started on March 1.)

Since uploading the new For Sale By Owner Homes logo to the web about an hour ago, they've written a blog post about the new look, tweeted about the logo to their 511 followers and posted a link on Facebook to their 224 (and growing) fan base.

Aside from getting backlinks in new, highly-ranked places, by client will also get exposure to hundreds of new potential customers.

Search for unique ways to get out your message, and opportunities to piggyback on the hype or good ideas of someone else. Even though I didn't think of this cool company idea, my client will benefit greatly from it. And, if you don't mind, head on over to I Design Your Logo, and let everyone know what you think of our client's new logo.

Customers Always Right?

2010-04-02T15:02:57Z

Hopefully, you see the irony in this video. In these real life customer service situations, some of the shenanigans that clients try to pull on us every day seem quite ridiculous. The video store, restaurant and hair salon are all businesses as well, but most people would never dream about trying to contest the price of a menu item. You ordered the steak, knowing what it would cost, and you pay for it before you leave.

So why, in other business situations, are these client behaviors considered acceptable? We may not like it when a client behaves in this way, but most of the time, we grin and bear it.

Recently, a client asked me to write a media kit for him. Prior to beginning the project, I gave him a quote of the project cost and he agreed. Upon receiving the first draft, he reviewed the text, made a few revisions and we were done. When it came time for him to pay the invoice, he fought and argued, saying my work wasn't worth what he had agreed to pay. Thinking he wasn't pleased with what we did, I asked him what he meant.

"I like what you did, but it didn't take as many revisions as I thought it would. So shouldn't your quote be reduced?," he asked.

While not all marketers work on a per project basis, we do. He wasn't paying me by the hour, but for the finished project, no matter how long it took. When I reminded him of this, he continued to push, convinced I should lower the price.

In a world of heavy competition and in a struggling economy, maybe we should always have the attitude that the customer is always right. I would bring up a different point, however. I believe that our businesses will suffer if we don't stick to our guns. I've traveled that slippery slope before with a client - she asks for an inch, and then takes a mile, and expects similar concessions with every project in the future.

The simplest, and really the only solution, is to work with your clients diligently, managing their expectations from the beginning of your relationship together. And politely stick to your guns. If you agreed to a certain price, do yourself a favor, and stick to it. Only make concessions if they're necessary- as in, you screwed something up.

You will loose a client or two along the way. That's not fun, but ultimately, you will end up having happier client relationships with people who do respect what you do, and are willing to pay you a fair price for your services.

YouTube the New Google?

2010-03-18T21:27:53Z

It was announced last week that YouTube is the #2 most searched site, second only to Google. What does this mean for you, as an entrepreneur? Well, it means that a LOT of people are going to YouTube to search for answers/ content. More so than Yahoo or Bing, or any other search engine for that matter.

So, it's high time you introduced some video content for your business. Actually not as hard as it might have once been, video content is a high priority for those businesses who desire to be found online. There are a number of video production companies out there who specialize in video for web, or you can delve into online do-it-yourself. If you search on YouTube, you'll find quite a lot of crap. So, you just have to make a relevant, content-rich, less crappy video.

Once this information came out about YouTube being so highly searched, I was charged with the task of getting one of my clients on YouTube. For Sale by Owner Homes already had videos on their site, as a lot of folks do, so we just had the team that created the videos combine several of the short clips into six informative YouTube-ready videos.

Take a look at one of their videos:

This is a great example of offering relevant, informative information while still promoting your business. Not a straight up commercial, but you'll find the company's contact information subtly on the screen.

Adding videos to YouTube is quite easy- don't forget to add a title, description and tags for your video to make it easily found. These will affect your video's ranking on YouTube initially, but your ranking will ultimately be driven by incoming links, number of comments, subscribers to your YouTube channel, views of your video and number (and quality) of sites that host your video outside of YouTube.

My Title is Cooler than YOUR Title

2010-03-11T04:54:43Z

Okay, not really. This is somewhere that I could actually use a little work. So, because I'm enjoying learning quite a bit about search engine optimization (or SEO) these days, I thought I'd share a little insight on how you can continue to improve your business's crawl towards to top of Google's rankings.

Today's topic: Title Tags

Title tags are just that- a title for your web page.

I pulled a screen shot of my website home page to show you exactly what I'm talking about- the part circled in red in your title tag. What's important for you to know is that title tags are really important when it comes to SEO. As in, it's one of the first things that Google sees, and should tell them exactly what a user will find when they visit this page.

So, what I'm saying, is that using "Home" for your title tag isn't the best option. Really, instead of using "Home" I should tell Google a little more about what can be found on this page. Some options would be:

"Fresh Look Creative - Boutique Creative Services Marketing Shop"

"Creative Services Marketing Shop - Fresh Look Creative - Plano, TX"

Or something to that effect... Being as descriptive as possible (in a very short amount of characters) is the goal, and trying to ensure that you're using highly-searched terminology is important too. That's why 'boutique' may not be the best term for me to use- even though that's a pretty commonly used term for us marketing folks, clients more than likely won't be using that as a search term.

Also, your title for each page within your site should be different. So, whatever I decide to use for my home page title, I should use something different for my 'About' page.

So, how do you change your title tags? Well, for me, I've got a content management system (or CMS) that allows me to just fill in a little blank. If you don't have a CMS built into your site, you will have to alter your title tags within your HTML. (Get with your webmaster if you have any questions about this.)

My hope is that little tips here and there will help you consistently improve your SEO. But, it is a full time job, as there are ALWAYS little (and big!) things that you can be doing to move your site up in the ranks. If you have any questions, let me know! Good luck!