HDM Blog

Why Your Website and Blog Should be Integrated

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:45:00 GMT

It is common for many organizations to have a company blog. However, many companies have a blog that is completely separate from their corporate website. Meaning, a company will have a website on one domain name (yourcompany.com), then have their blog hosted on a completely different domain and site (companyblog.wordpress.com).

Having a blog is great. A blog is an excellent way to market yourself/your company online. Blogs can engage customers, captivate website visitors, provide a platform to brand your expertise among many other useful marketing strategies.

The bad news is that having a blog that is not integrated into your corporate website essentially waters-down your efforts. Let's face it, Blogging takes time, effort and thought. Time is of the essence, if you're spending the time, you must use proper form to maximize your efforts.

Here are the top 3 reasons why we’d recommend integrating your blog into your corporate website:

#1 An Integrated Blog Creates a Better User Experience

Let's face it, gaining a website visitor is a big deal. There are countless websites and places for our prospects to visit on the web. If that prospect has chosen your site, it is the website owner's responsibility to ensure the visitor has the best possible experience. Keeping the visitor on your site encourages the visitor to explore your site and also helps potentially foster a precious website contact/inquiry.

Keeping visitors on your site is a big deal. This not only increases an important website metric – time on your site – but it also provides an opportunity for the visitor to get to know more about you in a single, integrated place without having to jump about from site to site. The user experience is smoother, less confusing and far more pleasurable.

#2 An Integrated Blog Helps Your SEO Efforts

You may already know that a site that is updated on a regular basis and has fresh, relevant content is more likely to generate better search engine rankings than a static site that is rarely updated or changes.

This is another key reason why integrating your blog into your corporate website is such an excellent strategy for building a strong site. When people search on Google, if your blog is integrated, the blog content appears to be fresh, regularly updated information that Google will recognize.

#3 An Integrated Blog Keeps Your Online Business Streamlined

Managing a website and blog are time consuming tasks, even if they are both integrated. When the site and blog are two separate entities, the process is unnecessarily time-consuming. The chances of both the website and blog staying fresh, when they are not integrated are so much lesser due to the amount of additional effort. Many times, changes are made to one site, and not the other.

We are big fans of platforms like WordPress and Blogger, but these platforms should be utilized properly so that business can maximize their efforts. If your business is experiencing this issue and you need help digging yourself out of this situation, we would like to work with you, contact us today by clicking on this link, or simply call 843.816.1203!

Why you shouldn't use Outlook, Hotmail, GMail or other email account/packages for Email Marketing Campaigns.

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:46:00 GMT

You risk getting your domain blacklisted
Sending attachments or graphics, or email content your customers and prospects did not request risks you being blacklisted. This is a serious issue for small businesses as your domain name normally matches your website and entire brand (if your domain name does not match your website and entire brand, you need to quit reading this and call us immediately).

Legal Reasons
Anti-spam laws state that you must offer a simple ability for the recipient to unsubscribe from your Email Newsletter. When business do not utilize a proper email marketing platform, the ability for the recipient to unsubscribe is non-existent.

Measurement
When you're not using a proper email marketing platform, there are no metrics to measure your efforts and response. This is a 'blast and hope' scenario with no analytics to backup your effort. Thus, you have no data to base any type of follow-up marketing activities.

Design Considerations
When you're not using a proper email marketing platform, it is next to impossible to obtain a professional-looking design. The poor design poses a challenge to maintaing the integrity of your brand. Also, when not using a proper email marketing platform, your graphics can get caught in spam filters, so your true message is never delivered.

Administrative Nightmare
When you're not using a proper email marketing platform, each time an email address bounces back, this bounce will land in your inbox. This causes you to have to manually clean your email list, which is not efficient, you and your team have better things to do during the course of the day.

Also, you must carefully monitor unsubscribe requests, good email marketing platform handles this for you through an automated system.

Conclusion
So, in the end, all of this adds up to serious issues. When making an attempt to do an email marketing campaign without a proper platform, you'll end up spending more time than necessary for a result that is unprofessional and ineffective. Its a no brainer to contact us so we can assist you with your online goals.

HTML5, YouTube and the Future of Flash Video

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:42:00 GMT

The current undisputed champion of web video is, hands-down, Adobe's Flash. However, YouTube is showing us that things may be changing in the near future. HTML5 only requires that your browser support HTML5 to view video. Pretty cool, video without plugins. I am a big fan of Flash Video, I’m all for a high-quality, and this new move could just be the swift kick in the pants that online video has been needing for a while now.

An Overview of Website Navigation

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:43:00 GMT

Web surfers are always going to be an impatient group. If a website is difficult to figure out due to the links are not obvious then they quickly will go away and never come back. Website navigation is always going to be one of the most essential elements in determining the effectiveness of a website.

A web designer must always keep in mind that the fundamental idea of the website and the intended audience while designing navigational elements. Of all the website exist the most of the websites live to either provide information to the visitor about a products or services to actually sell them. With this being true, there are some basic guidelines to follow:

You have to make sure that the navigational elements are going to be intelligently linked by using standard methods and elements of links such as buttons, menus, underlining the text or changing color on mouse and you also need to stay away the temptation to use clever or ambiguous names for links.

If you have opted for entirely different or somewhat different links then expressly inform the audience that this is a link if you design a web page where you want to use a map showing several different regions and want to let the user click on the city name to pull up information about that city. Here you need to make sure that you have informed well in advance to the user to click on the city name to get more information about that city.

You always need to remember and need to follow the basic rule of three clicks that most of the professional web professionals use. Survey and studies have shown that most of the users will not click more than three or maximum four links to get to the required information they want so every page on your website should be reachable within couple of clicks.

Copywriting for Your Website

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:43:00 GMT

Did you know that writing copy for a website is an art. Engaging the reader, effectively delivering your message while also generating search engine optimization points is where the art lies. Effective business messaging attracts and holds customers, builds brand awareness and explains products and services irresistibly. If you're providing mediocre content and messaging on your website, then get the troops ready for to mediocre results.

I recently learned that the attention span of the average human being is a short six-seconds. So, when someone is surfing the web - its probably a bit shorter. When engaging your website visitor and delivering your message, you need to have a strategy in place.

The tone of website copy is changing, I believe. There is a shift in effective copywriting to the second-person narrative. This is the same approach that Choose Your Own Adventure books, musical lyrics, role-playing games, Do-It-Yourself manuals have been using for years and the web is catching on.

Here is a link to an excellent article in the December issue of Entrepreneur magazine that hits the nail on the head (Click Here). What do you think about it?

The Importance of YouTube In a Digital Marketing Strategy

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:43:00 GMT

Question: We all know that Google is the number one search engine. So, who's number two?

Yahoo? MSN? Bing? - Nope.

Its YouTube.

Really?

Yep. You Tube.

In October 2009, 3.7 Billion search queries were conducted on YouTube. ComSource, a source for digital intelligence, translates this into a 31% increase over the past 12 months.

What does this mean for business owners?

The time to start thinking about posting your company video on YouTube is gone! It is time to start uploading any form (any good form) of promotional video content about your company to YouTube. You can even create your own YouTube channel for your company. When creating a YouTube channel or posting your video content to YouTube, an essential part of the process is YouTube Search Engine Optimization. Your video content should be tagged with the proper description, titles and tags to ensure that your content is found by your potential viewers.

Website Templates vs. Custom Designed Website

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:43:00 GMT

How much is your company worth to you? How much is a successful company's brand worth? These are two serious questions that should not be taken lightly.

Over the past decade the face of technology and marketing has drastically changed. Ten years ago, home computing was just starting to become mainstream. Surfing the web took place on a low tide dial-up connection. Mobile phones were used to pretty much just make phone calls - and you could play Snake on the green back-lit screen. But today, all of this has changed. Computers are found in 80 percent of homes in the United States. Now outfitted with cable and fiber optic connections so we can now surf the web at faster speeds. The annoying dial-up sound we once heard is now history. Today we have mobile devices that offer way more than the simple ability to make calls. We can read the latest up-to-the-minute news headlines, track weather by radar, send and receive email, post to our Facebook page and heaps of other goodies, too many to mention in this blog post, but it all takes place on an amazing color screen - touch screen in most cases.

Let's get back to our original question about successful companies. How much is a successful company's online brand worth? A brand is a piece of your company that sets you apart from your competition. No matter what your competition may be, a smart brand is a key ingredient in a successful company.

Why would a company want to brand their online business with a generic template website?

Website Templates

A website does cost some money. One way to save money when creating a website is to use a pre-designed template. A template is a site that has already been built and is waiting for you to add your personalized content. Kind of like a new house that you have had no say in what it looks like from a design standpoint. You just add the furniture (your content) into the pre-built house (website template).

Pros: Its cheap.

Cons: You pay for what you get. No custom branding.

Custom Designed Website

A custom designed website, on the other hand, is the most effective way to make a website your own. There is a lot of skill and talent that goes into the creation and development of a good custom website. The first step is to work with a web design company that can learn about you, your company, your services, your products and your customer. Through this process a vision is formed, then shortly develops into your online presence.

With a custom design, you have the opportunity to have a voice in the creation of your site. Don't like that color - let's change it to this. Can we center this rather than left justify. Can we increase the size of our logo here. You become a part of the creation process. This will allow for the personality of your business to shine through your website.

Pros: Every aspect of the website is crafted for your company.

Cons: It may cost a little more.

The primary focus of Hazel Interactive is to take your online business to the next level. We have no gimmicks. No slick sales tricks up our sleeves. We have a proven system to help you grow your business.

Is Your Business Website Still Breathing

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:43:00 GMT

These days, you can't afford not to have a website. Most people, organizations and businesses have some sort of web presence out there. Alot of them are basically "online brochures" so to speak. Essentially they have information about a company that just sits on the web hoping people will find it and read it. Most businesses get their website up with some information about their company and call it good. Got a website? Check. Now forget about it for years.

The reality is... that's not enough anymore! You need more than just a static website that gives basic information to people. You need a dynamic site that allows for interaction between you, your customers and potential leads. You need a website that's alive with fresh and unique content that keeps them coming back for more. Ask yourself these questions: "Is my website still breathing? Was it EVER alive at all?"

Check out this small business article from Microsoft. We're not making this stuff up! Times are changing and static websites are no longer an effective tool for your company's presence on the web.

If your website isn't breathing, it's time to do CPR. Here are some of the features our online business websites have that can help you attract and retain more customers and keep them connected to your website.

1. contact forms that capture leads and feedback into a database

2. a blog to communicate with your customers

3. online forum to establish a community around your product or services

4. member only areas with unique content

5. a CMS (content management system) so you can keep your content fresh

6. email newsletter subscription forms

7. much more just ask!

If you have a static website, or don't yet have a website and are wanting a living, breathing, online business solution for your company, you've come to the right place. Request a quote and let us help you today!

Welcome to Our Blog!

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:41:00 GMT

This is my first blog post on this website - this online business to be exact!

Feel free to grab a cup of tea and a cookie, put your feet up and take a look around. You'll find heaps of great content and information about my business, and there's plenty of goodies.

I hope you enjoy and feel free to let me know what you think!