Web and BeyondCast, Episode 002 – How to Build a Website, Part 1 – Good Website Design and Development with K. Ryan Cleland of W Street Design (https://w.w3cinc.com/2oz04cT)
To start off Web and BeyondCast, we are beginning with a series. We’re going to touch on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart and business–how to build a website. In this episode we will be discussing principles of good Small Business website design and development.
(Please visit https://w.w3cinc.com/2PxLDRL for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)
In Part 1 of the “How to Build a Website” series, we tackled the following topics:
– How to approach designing your website
– How to choose a great domain name (website address or “URL”) for your business
– How to select and set up a Web hosting account/service for your website/blog
– How to create and prepare your content for the website/blog
– How to develop an Editorial Calendar for your website/blog
– How and what to test, and creating a Tweak-Maintenance Plan (TMP) for your website/blog
– How to plan out Analytics, Social Media & Mobile components and syndication
– How to set up analytics and security tools.
– Timeline to Launch a Small Business Website
Pinning for Profit & Publicity with Purpose:
Marketing Strategies for Using Pinterest for Small Business
Pinterest garners 200 million monthly users on its image-based social network. And, its demographics are lucrative to many small businesses in the US–female majority (at around 45%), planning actively for events (e.g., weddings, trips, and parties), covers Boomers, Gen X and Millennials, and 66% of Pinterest users make over $50,000 per year.
With that said, whether you’re looking to profit, gain greater publicity, or market a social cause related to your business, if those demographics appeal to your business, then Pinterest is for you. And, that requires a strong Pinterest marketing strategy for your business. This is a Web-based presentation on identifying the best marketing strategy for Pinterest for your small business.
In this Pinterest for Small Business Webinar, we covered:
● An overview of the Pinterest platform so you can be more familiar with the content available;
● In-depth analysis of the demographics of Pinterest today; and
● How to create a targeted content or ad strategy on Pinterest for small business.
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These Webinars are hosted by the Virginia Small Business Development Center Network and presented by Ray Sidney-Smith, Author of “SoLoMo Success” (available on Amazon Kindle and paperback), Digital Marketing Strategist, Host of Web and BeyondCast (available where you listen to podcasts), and Managing Director of W3C Web Services, providing affordable Web hosting, Managed WordPress, email, domain and other related services for Small Business.
Facebook has had a rough year so far, having its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, get grilled before a Congressional representatives after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Their stock share prices have dropped precipitously since implementing a number of measures to stop foreign interventions on the platform, along with the loss of some users’ trust. That said, Facebook is still a juggernaut in the social networking space. They own not only Facebook, but Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR (virtual reality headset maker), and a few dozen other companies.
Facebook isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. And their advertising platform can be a great way to get out in front of customers, if your small business has the budget. In this Web-based presentation, Digital Marketing Strategist Ray Sidney-Smith explained the basics and tools for creating effective ad campaigns on Facebook.
In this Webinar, we covered: – Who is best suited to use Facebook Ads; – How to create ads for Facebook campaigns; – What are the types of advertising campaigns you can run on Facebook; and – What are the tools you use to setup and manage Facebook Ads campaigns.
If you have any additional questions coming out of this Webinar, feel free to tweet @w3consulting #beyondgoogle or use our contact form. We’ll be happy to see if we can help!
What do many energy companies, 300 universities, (UnderArmour-owned) MyFitness Pal’s 150 million users, and a half-million routers in the United States have in common? They were all hacked in 2018.
That doesn’t include attacks that were not reported purposefully and/or are still undiscovered.
Beware: your business data is always at risk. And, you need to take proper precautions of your business data, which many times includes your customer’s data.
In this Webinar, we will cover:
– What hackers are looking to achieve by hacking into your small business data;
– A variety of cyber-attacks that are prevalent today and which you need to be concerned about, and
– What tools are available today to help your small business protect against just such attacks.
This doesn’t take a lot of upfront effort, money or other resources, but it does require ongoing, consistent diligence.
These Webinars are hosted by the Virginia Small Business Development Center Network and presented by Ray Sidney-Smith, Author of “SoLoMo Success” (available on Amazon Kindle and paperback), Digital Marketing Strategist, and Managing Director of W3C Web Services, providing affordable Web hosting, Managed WordPress, email, domain and other related services for Small Business. With the transfer of your business’ domain, WordPress *and* email hosting services, get a complimentary 1-hour Web, Mobile & Social Media marketing strategy session. Visit our contact page to request full details and to get started!
For future, semi-monthly Webinars, please visit Virginia SBDC’s Webinars page to see upcoming topics and to register.
On “Switched on IT,” the PowerTV Australia show that’s co-hosted by Doug Endersbee of OZ Hosting and W3 Consulting’s Ray Sidney-Smith, Episode 10, Doug and Ray discuss WordPress for Small Business, originally a blog content management system (CMS) that now runs about one-third of all the websites on the Internet. We discuss what other CMS’s exist, and what sets WordPress apart, what WordPress can do, and some of the ways you can dodge challenges you might face when trying to launch a WordPress website for your business.
Resources | WordPress for Small Business
If you have any questions about WordPress, it’s always best to first check out the Codex on WordPress.org. It’s the master manual of all things WordPress.
For eCommerce on WordPress, check out the free plugin WooCommerce.
For backup, security and comment spam protection and many other features, check out Jetpack. There is a free and paid version of this plugin.
Here are a few recent talks at WordCamps about WordPress that might be useful:
For a beginner run-through of WordPress, this is a great talk on getting started with WordPress for Small Business.
As we discussed, security is an important topic for any website, and this WordCamp talk goes over the most important aspects of how to secure WordPress for Small Business websites.
If you have a question about your WordPress website project, please feel free to leave a comment and we’ll try to help you out. Or, if you’re looking for development or hosting, please reach out. Here’s to your SoLoMo Success!
Since the invention of the hyperlink, the Internet and the World Wide Web (which are different things), the real world has never been the same. And, while access to your business through Google and other search engines and local listing directories have power, nothing is more powerful than your business domain.
In this presentation, Ray Sidney-Smith walked through everything you need to and maybe always wanted to know about domain names!
We covered:
– A brief history of domains
– The rules of domains
– Ray’s guidelines for choosing great business domain names
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These Webinars are hosted by the Virginia Small Business Development Center Network – http://virginiasbdc.org – and presented by Ray Sidney-Smith, Author of “SoLoMo Success” (available on Amazon Kindle and paperback), Digital Marketing Strategist, and Managing Director of W3C Web Services, providing affordable Web hosting, Managed WordPress, email, domain and other related services for Small Business – http://web.w3cinc.com. With the transfer of your business’ domain, WordPress *and* email hosting services, get a complimentary 1-hour Web, Mobile & Social Media marketing strategy session. Visit https://ift.tt/2EYfhd4 to request full details and to get started!
Amazon.com, Inc., the ecommerce and cloud computing juggernaut based out of Seattle, is 24 years old. And, four years ago, in honor of its 20th birthday (so it said) it launched Amazon Prime Day, a retail holiday filled with deals on everything from electronics to household appliances and, of course, Amazon products. Prime Day starts on the afternoon of July 16, 2018 and runs all day through July 17, 2018.
Amazon benefits in multiple ways as a 250-million-customer business with half-a-million employees and gross revenues topping about 178 billion US dollars. First, they get to offload inventory that has been languishing in their warehouses through partnerships with their sellers, especially as new models of products are set to be announced. Additionally, they get to push their own line of Amazon electronics and consumer products into customers’ hands and homes; from the Amazon Echo line of products (now numbering about 10 different models), Amazon Kindle ereaders, and Amazon Basics home goods products. Finally, they get to expand on their 100 million Amazon Prime members. The more Prime members, the more expensive it is to give all those benefits to those of us who shell out the 120 USD per year for the program to get free 2-day shipping, and a host of other benefits. So, they have to keep the new Prime members coming to keep up with the rising costs of shipping and handling. Altogether, Prime Day is a slam dunk for Amazon.
So, how are other retailers responding to Amazon’s shopping day?
Target will offer special deals July 17, overlapping with Amazon Prime Day https://t.co/7bxBPohoxj
Walmart, eBay, Macy’s and more have followed suit. They are defending their summer retail sales as much as they are seeing Amazon Prime Day for the opportunity it is. This leads me to you, the Small Business owner. Whether you are a retailer or service business, now is the time to take advantage of Amazon Prime Day! Just as Small Business Saturday provides a platform to showcase your business as being a part of your local community and economy, come up with a way that you can surf the Prime Day wave of website traffic, deals and more…in two ways.
The prime way (pun intended) is to offer a deal yourself that coincides with Prime Day, or the week following. If you’re a spa, restaurant or massage therapist, have a deal for the evenings of Prime Day sales, as a way to soothe your customers after their hard work scouring the Web for deals. Have fun with it!
If you’re a retail shop, price match Amazon deals for Prime members; simply have them come in and prove their Amazon Prime membership with their mobile phone app in-store. (You can also have them screenshot their Amazon Prime membership page and email it to your business for you to review and email back a discount code.)
If you provide customization for your products that Amazon cannot do, make sure that you tout that in your Social Media, via email marketing newsletters, and to the press. That’s an angle that local journalists would be interested potentially in covering.
Also, think about the big purchases you might have made later in the year and see if Amazon Prime Day doesn’t have a discount worth taking advantage of, for your business. By buying it during Prime Day and then publicizing the purchase on Social Media, this too can get the attention of local media that might not have considered the effect of Prime Day on small business owners snagging some of the deals. This doesn’t and won’t work for everyone, especially if you weren’t planning on buying Amazon smart devices or a big appliance (like a fridge for your café) or electronics (such as a television for your conference room). The point is to keep in mind that your buying power as a business is also publicity, at times.
You should note that because Amazon Prime Day is on Monday, it’s not too late. You can offer discounts for an entire week, or the whole rest of the month of July. Similar to Restaurant Week participants that extend their restaurants’ prix fixe menus for more than a week, you control the deals and their length. What’s dragging down your sales, languishing in your inventory? Put that on discount now. Are you getting new products in a couple of months and want to move product before its obsolete? Now’s an opportune time.
Yes, Big Box retailers, and “etailers” like Amazon.com, make it harder for Small Business at times. But, as a Small Business, you have your local community to reach out to to support your business. Take advantage of these moments when consumers are paying attention to get your deals in front of them too.
The Best Marketing for Your Handmade Business:
Taking Your Craft Business to the Web
Here’s the handout for this Webinar: https://ift.tt/2NNIs8h
You have a passion. It’s your craft. And, now, you want to take it to market! But, you don’t know how to market your handicrafts on the Web. There are so many options and each seems like you need a masterclass just to get started.
We are going to demystify the process of taking your crafted goods and making them available for sale online. We’ll discuss the pro’s and con’s of using Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and other platforms, and resources to get started.
In this Webinar, we will cover:
– How to develop a marketing strategy for custom-made handcrafted goods on the Web today;
– What are the platforms and tools you can use to get your products to market; and,
– Further resources to learn how to use these platforms and tools so that getting your products to market isn’t daunting. Some of it is time-consuming, but with the right help from technology, you can do it!
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These Webinars are hosted by the Virginia Small Business Development Center Network – http://virginiasbdc.org – and presented by Ray Sidney-Smith, Author of “SoLoMo Success” (available on Amazon Kindle and paperback), Digital Marketing Strategist, and Managing Director of W3C Web Services, providing affordable Web hosting, Managed WordPress, email, domain and other related services for Small Business – http://web.w3cinc.com. With the transfer of your business’ domain, WordPress *and* email hosting services, get a complimentary 1-hour Web, Mobile & Social Media marketing strategy session. Visit https://ift.tt/2EYfhd4 to request full details and to get started!
While it may seem like successful Small Business owners were overnight successes and can multitask like a harried, four-armed Vishnu, it’s usually false. Successful Small Business owners frequently have several major failures under their belts, and they usually had a lot of help bringing their success to fruition. While we can’t guarantee success, we can provide tools to help you defeat the crisis of not having enough help to become successful.
Thanks to the openness, connectivity, and relative low cost of the Internet today, we now have the ability to work with many people over vast distances at affordable rates. Some of those people who can help your Small Business are Virtual Assistants (a/k/a VA’s). They have many different functions and abilities, work remotely, and we’ll discuss how to take best advantage of these valuable resources in this Web-based seminar.
In this Webinar, we will cover:
– Best-practices for deciding what you can outsource to a Virtual Assistant;
– Where to find and how to vet Virtual Assistants for your business’s needs;
– How to effectively train Virtual Assistants so you don’t have to repeat yourself over and over again, especially if you work with several Virtual Assistants; and,
– Tools that can help you manage your Virtual Assistants from anywhere
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These Webinars are hosted by the Virginia Small Business Development Center Network – http://virginiasbdc.org – and presented by Ray Sidney-Smith, Author of SoLoMo Success (available on Amazon Kindle and paperback), Digital Marketing Strategist, and Managing Director of W3C Web Services, providing affordable Web hosting, Managed WordPress, email, domain and other related services for Small Business. With the transfer of your business’ domain, WordPress *and* email hosting services, get a complimentary 1-hour Web, Mobile & Social Media marketing strategy session. Click here to request full details and to get started!
Document Automation in the Cloud: Streamlining Business Documents Creation Using Web Tools
Often not discussed is the amount of time, energy and resources spent in managing documents in Small Business. It can take hours or even days to produce some documents, such as proposals, estimates, contracts, employment and vendor contracts, invoices, and other complex agreements. As well, little known is that there are ways to speed up the production process with Web-based tools today (that is, document automation in the cloud) that allow you to automate a majority of your document production projects.
In this Document Automation in the Cloud Webinar, we covered:
– Best-practices for determining what documents to automate and how to plan out document templates;
– Where you can source document templates to speed up the document creation and automation process; and,
– Tools that can help you build out document templates that can turn hours and days of work typing into mere minutes.
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These Webinars are hosted by the Virginia Small Business Development Center Network and presented by Ray Sidney-Smith, Author of “SoLoMo Success” (available on Amazon Kindle and paperback), Digital Marketing Strategist, and Managing Director of W3C Web Services, providing affordable Web hosting, Managed WordPress, email, domain and other related services for Small Business.
Amazon.com, Inc., the ecommerce and cloud computing juggernaut based out of Seattle, is 24 years old. And, four years ago, in honor of its 20th birthday (so it said) it launched 