Monthly Archives: May 2009

Best Practices in Nonprofit Website Design

Non-profit websites share many of the same best practices as any website. They need to be user friendly, easily navigable, and use appropriate fonts, colors, and other design elements. But often a non-profit website needs to offer more than your typical corporate site.

A non-profit’s website needs to make it easy to find out more about their cause, to donate money, and to become more involved. It needs to make it easy for media contacts to find the information they need and the contact information of key personnel. And it needs to do all this in a way that’s inviting to the organization’s targeted donors and/or volunteers.

Below are a list of best practices for designing non profit websites followed by some examples of non profit websites that are getting things right. … Read more at Non Profit Website Design: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Magazine, published 14 May 2009.

Flickr photo credit: tobiashm

By |2012-01-05T07:14:16+01:00May 20, 2009|Blog, Nonprofits|0 Comments

E-mail Newsletters That Customers Actually Read

I recently received an e-mail that had me riveted from start to finish. It contained a true story about two men aboard US Airways flight 1549—the one that crash-landed into the Hudson River. Both passengers had regularly backed up their critical computer data. One did this by transferring info from his hard drive to a second computer, but he had taken both laptops on the plane. The other passenger had used an online backup service called Mozy (owned by EMC). I read their stories in the monthly Mozy newsletter, which I chose to receive when I signed up for Mozy myself. It’s full of fun, interesting, and valuable stories and tips.

During a recent interview, Dave Robinson, Mozy’s vice-president of marketing, explained how any business owner can make an e-mail newsletter more compelling. I also spoke with Janine Popick, chief executive of VerticalResponse, an e-mail and direct marketing provider for small businesses. Here’s their advice on how to get customers to read your e-mail newsletters. Read more of this article at E-mail Newsletters That Customers Actually Read – BusinessWeek, published 4 May 2009.

Flickr photo credit: kin-ichi

By |2012-01-05T06:58:54+01:00May 20, 2009|Blog, Marketing|0 Comments

A Guide to Video Search Marketing

Search engines are pushing the universal search movement to evolve results into a multimedia-rich blend of images, maps, local and video. As a result, search engine algorithms will look more favorably on video content for the top spots on their result pages, meaning the opportunity for exposure increases for any video producer that is on top of its SEO game.

So says my friend and Kelsey Group analyst Michael Boland, and I have to agree when I see searches like “reclaimed fireplaces lewes” yield eight out of the ten first page spots on Google taken by video (at time of writing). What you’re seeing there is a small business practically owning the first page of Google for it’s chosen long-tail keywords, and it’s not difficult to do if you know how.

If you’re hoping to get your videos to rank well in search results, there are three things you’ll need to consider (you might call these the basic elements of video SEO):

  • Video production (how, production quality, duration, formats, etc)
  • Landing page (where will your video drive traffic?)
  • Distribution (getting your video out there, keywords, descriptions, links and SEO)

Video production

The first thing to realize is that most video production companies have only about 30% of the solution that’s needed for any small business. The other 70% you need to do yourself, or get someone to do for you. Why? Well, they think the benefit is all in the production and the finished article, but it isn’t. It’s what you do with video that counts—and that’s to do with the distribution and landing page. So, my advice is this: pay only about 30% of your attention to the video production. The rest comes after that.

You have a wide range of options for getting video produced these days. Here are just a few… read more at A Guide To Video Search Marketing For Small Businesses – Search Engine Land, published 7 May 2009.

Flickr photo credit: Irina Souiki

By |2012-01-05T07:15:25+01:00May 20, 2009|Blog, Online Marketing|1 Comment
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