CrownJewelEvents.com

The Evaluation

This project was a little different than most of the work we handle. It all started at about 1am on a random weeknight, I believe it was a Tuesday. I was sitting at my desk finishing up some work and preparing for a little vacation I was heading out on the next morning. As I was wrapping up and getting ready for bed, I received a facebook message (another example of how facebook is not only an office work diversion but a great networking tool) from an acquaintance whom I had met while working for someone else. Carmella, the owner of event planning company Crown Jewel Events had commissioned another firm to build her new site recently, and it was now broken and needed a fix. The blog portion of the site was completely non existent, and the gallery page was returning errors and just not working. Carmela also had no way to update the site on her own or add new content, she had no control whatsoever over her web presence. As if that were not enough, the company she used to build her site was also her host, and of course they went out of business, leaving her to scramble and fend for herself for a week trying to procure hosting and transfer the site on her own, which was a daunting task for her as it would be for most people who aren’t web developers.  This is where I came into the picture. She needed someone to get her gallery back on track and set up the blogging page on her site.

The Process

We don’t like to work on existing sites as a general rule, it becomes a nightmare to untangle someone else’s work and is very difficult having to support something built by someone else. Logistical problems always pop up and it becomes a blame game between the last developer, the current developer, the host, and the client, and in the end even if we win the argument, we have a client with a broken site, so we still lose. Still, I saw Carmella struggling and wanted to help get her on track as quickly as possible. I got into her files and saw that the blog was never set up to begin with, and the gallery was based on some proprietary flash-based script that the former designer/hosting company used, so the gallery was going to have to be rebuilt.

After speaking to Carmella, I also deduced that whatever new hosting company she went to was not a good fit for her. They gave her absolutely no support whatsoever during her transfer, while a lot of reputable hosts would not only give better support, but also provide site transfers at minimal to no cost. The issues she had with attempting the transfer herself sent up red flags that she should not be using this service. I researched her hosting agreement and saw that a 100% refund was possible, so I suggested getting that refund and going with a better (and cheaper) host that I knew would not be going out of business and leaving her hanging again.

After spending a few moments looking through Carmella’s files, I realized that it would take about the same amount of time to recreate her whole site using wordpress as it would be to just create the blog and gallery pages. She was more than happy with the look and layout of her site and didn’t want to spend the time or money redesigning it, so all I had to do was migrate from a static html site to a custom skin on top of wordpress that looked the same. The benefit to this would be that she would now have 100% control of the site, with the ability to easily add photos, content, and blog posts describing her events, with a web interface and no need for coding. The site would also be built on open source architecture and easily upgraded and moved.

The finished fully migrated site is a clone of her original site, we did none of the design or graphics work, but we did have to build a custom wordpress skin using those design elements and build a structure that worked just as the site originally did. The site is now future proof and easy for a computer novice to update and administer.

Some of the interesting design elements:

• Facebook and twitter buttons linking the site to those popular social networking platforms.
• Gallery. The client can now add some of her best shots to the gallery light box easily.
• An events/blog page. We set up a page where the client can easily update the site to include announcements on special events or anything else they want to share on the site.
• Rotating image box. Every page on the site now has an image box in the right corner that randomly changes whenever a page is loaded.

NYCLittleItalyTours.com

The Evaluation

I was approached by the clients, Ralph and Ernest, about creating a simple website for a walking tour company they were in the process of starting up. These are the kinds of projects we love here, new businesses, in their infancy, being created. I sat down with Ralph and Ernest and listened to what they were going to be doing and asked them some questions about the business and also some questions about themselves, which really helped us to form a great story and angle for the company.

At first, the only real thing they had was that they wanted to run these walking tours that would stop at these different spots and end up with a nice Italian meal included in the price. After sitting there and talking with them, I realized that they had a very interesting angle that they didn’t realize and definitely were not exploiting, their own experience with the neighborhood. See, Ralph and Ernest happen to be life long residents of the Little Italy neighborhood. They not only grew up here, but they are also members of various political and social clubs and organizations as well as business owners and employees in the neighborhood. This is really different from your average NYC walking tour guide or any tour guide book you could buy anywhere. This unique relationship between the neighborhood and themselves meant that they new a lot of the interesting details that no other tour guide could know, which could only mean a more interesting tour. This “neighborhood insider” angle I felt was the story this company needed to make them unique, and when I pitched this to Ralph and Ernest they completely agreed

The Process

Since this business was a total startup, they had nothing to incorporate as far as content, logo, or google indexed links, so we were working with a clean slate. This makes things super easy from a design standpoint as we have no real restrictions, but also difficult in that content like images needed to be generated. Over the years we have developed really close relationships with a lot of people, and in this case a quick call to my friend and wonder photographer Efrain and we were set. We dispatched him to Little Italy to shoot a few pics of an actual tour that was being given, and he came back with some great pics. Our relationship with him allowed our client to benefit by getting some quality images done quickly and at a nice discounted rate. This also allowed us to coordinate with the photographer to make sure we got all the shots needed for graphics for the site and that we got prompt delivery of the images to expedite the site construction.

Some of the interesting design elements:

• Banner. The client didn’t have the budget for a full pro logo design (which we handle here if needed) so we had our photographer take a suitable picture to use in place of the logo.
• Paypal integration. The client had no need or budget for a full ecommerce solution but did need a way to acept payment online for ticket sales. We worked with them in setting up a paypal account, then integrated that into the site for a nice simple payment solution.
• An events/blog page. We set up a page where the client can easily update the site to include announcements on special events or anything else they want to share on the site.

The Next Step

The client now has a clean, professional site to promote their business. The next step is a marketing attack. We suggest a combination of social network marketing using various tools on the internet, as well as using google adwords. We can set up and manage all of this, or set it up and hand it off to the client to manage themselves.

LindsayAngel.com

The Evaluation

We just finished up a design for another client of ours, Lindsay Angel. Lindsay is a young up-and-coming photographer that was looking for a way to showcase her work and convey a professional appearance as a legitimate professional photographer. When Lindsay came to us, she had a bunch of urls and some template site that she had hastily set up on a godaddy account using their website tonight tools. The site didn’t have a cohesive feel as different pieces were put together to incorporate some info pages and image galleries. Lindsay quickly realized she was spending valuable time learning web design and NOT doing what her passion and her job is, taking great photos. This is where The JM3 Group comes in. We understand what it is like to run a small business on a budget, and we know all too well the frustration in trying to handle every aspect of your business to minimize costs yet still achieve the high level of quality and professionalism desired. We discussed Lindsay’s ideas for what she would like her site to be, we researched what other successful photographers were doing, and we pitched her our idea for what LindsayAngel.com should be. She loved the ideas we came up with and tossed us the keys to her site and ran off to do what she does best, take great images, and left us to do what we do best, make great sites.

The Process

We looked over a collection of Lindsay’s work and quickly realized that her photography skews toward the more creative side, taking pictures of everyday scenes and objects and framing them in a certain way and at the right moment to really make them into pieces of art. Seeing how her images really kind of tell a story, we decided to build the site to be a stylish minimalist backdrop that provides a clean matte that compliments her work and draws the viewers eyes to the work and not some gimmicky graphical elements. This is the reasoning behind our black textured background and minimal use of color.

The same idea carried over to the logo/branding. Lindsay did not have a logo, so we had to come up with something that meshed well with the site and feel we were going for. We chose a stylish and simple sans serif font, played with the thickness and color to break up her name and add a little style, and that was all, no stroke, no gradient, no drop shadow, just a clean, stylish, elegant and understated logo. We also used the logo elements to create a watermark for Lindsay to use on her images.

Some of the interesting design elements:

• Flash. Normally we avoid flash like the plague, it is really a cop-out for a web designer to use and wreaks havoc on usability for the viewer and indexing by google as well as not even showing up on iphones and handhelds. The one case where we make an exception is for model/photographer portfolios, it really makes sense for these sites. While we used some flash for the home page and portfolio, the site is not flash based so a lot of the issues we have with it are minimized.
• Photo Blog. We thought that a great way for Lindsay to share her images would be through a blog. We made it very easy for her to update with new content as frequently as she likes, and we even created a video tutorial for her to use showing how to do the updates to the site.
• Social Network Tools. We coded some icons into the blog allowing viewers to easily share Lindsay’s work through facebook, twitter, digg, stumble upon and other popular social networks. This helps to increase traffic and exposure for the site.

The Next Step

Now that a clean, cohesive, branded site is established as a base, our next step with Lindsay is to consult with her on how to market herself and her site. Having a great home base like her site is imperative before you try to use all of the social networking tools to try and market yourself.

Also, we left a placeholder page for an ecommerce component to sell prints of her work. At some point a custom LindsayAngel.com branded third-party service will be linked there.

Ok, let’s catch up here. Last week I posted the first part of this series, “What is Twitter.” That was really a primer for anyone who has heard of twitter but just was clueless to what exactly it is and a basic rundown of how to sign up and get started using it. For a lot of people, this first part was probably a little too basic, so anyone who has already signed up and begun to use it can just skip it, but if you have yet to sign onto the twitterverse and jump in, swing back to part 1 and take a look……….ok, now that you are all caught up, let’s bounce to the next part, where things start to get interesting, well, if you are a geek, into marketing, or have a business you will find it interesting. The rest of you can go look at internet porn or whatever.

Part 2, Why You Should Be Using Twitter, or Twitter, Not Just For Internet Stalkers!

Who Cares About Your Starbucks Latte Anyway?

As you venture into the social networking waters with twitter and start to follow friends you will notice quickly why it gets a bad wrap by some of the post-teen crowd. Lots of people who in real life aren’t very interesting are shockingly just as not interesting in cyberspace. It makes sense, a keyboard isn’t generally going to come with personality or sprout a sense of humor in someone. So after scrolling through some random posts about how hungry, how good their dunkin donuts coffee is, how bad rush hour traffic sucks, and stupid coworkers and bosses in the tweets of people you may marginally consider friends to begin with, you sit there and wonder “well, what’s the point of this anyway?” Let me be the first to admit, if this were all that twitter was I would be the first to agree. But no worries, this post will show you the tweet-light!

After this post you will understand how:

• Twitter functions as a rapid news source
• Twitter can help you gain exposure and act as a traffic stream to your website
• Twitter can act like a better version of email marketing
• Twitter can keep you up to date on happenings in you industry and competitors
• Twitter can help you manage your brand reputation
• Twitter can help you become an authority on a given subject or industry

Those are all some pretty great uses of twitter, and way more valuable than using it to let everyone know what kind of coffee you just had, wouldn’t ya say?

1) EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT, Before It Is Even Printed!!

In today’s world with minute by minute news coverage and the death of news media relics like newspapers, the speed with which we are getting news and information is being pushed faster and faster. Twitter and its simple premise has quickly overtaken internet giants like google in disseminating news headlines.

The combination of a simple yet quick delivery mechanism with the following of millions of people around the world is just the most efficient medium for spreading news fast. It is so good at this that all of the networks are scrambling to create a presence on twitter, with CNN set up with 45 twitter feeds alone!

2) Check Out My New Blog!! CLICK HERE!!!!

And here is where we start to dive into how twitter can help your marketing/branding/business. Everyone knows that you can have the best website in the world, the most and best content out there that people want and need, the cheapest prices, and tons of free stuff, but none of that matters if nobody can find you in the sea of internet flotsam and jetsam(look here for all the non-nautical readers) floating around out there. It is all about traffic in internet marketing, and while a lot of money can be spent to get quality traffic, twitter acts as a great low cost (or free if you do it yourself) way to get genuine quality traffic to your site. By using solid techniques ( which we will discuss in the next part of this series next week) and using twitter in some of the ways I describe below, you can generate lots of readers and followers that will click on links in your tweets and in your twitter profile that will lead them to wherever you want, including your blog or e-commerce site.

3) Email Marketing, Leave it To the Russian Spammers Slinging Magic Penis Enlargement Pills

Nobody can deny that since the invention and success of the internet, one of the biggest boons to business has been email. Of course we know that email is great for passing information and keeping in contact with people, but it also allows businesses to send out mass emails promoting their business, services, or products. It also is a great tool for sending out newsletters and informational messages on a mass scale for much less money and far less hassle than direct mail marketing and traditional print snail mail. But just like every other tech advancement that allows someone to reach more people faster and cheaper, it has brought in a lot of nefarious business practices, like spamming, to the point that the whole medium has taken a huge knock in its effectiveness. Well, twitter can act in some ways like email marketing, and as easy and cheap as email marketing is, twitter is even easier, faster, and cheaper! With twitter, you can quickly broadcast links to anywhere you want, and those broadcasts are instantaneous and free. By using some solid techniques and using twitter in the ways described here, you can be at the forefront of internet marketing with little-to-no cost. We will go into the nuts and bolts of this next week in the final part of this series.

4) Double-OH-TWEET, or Industrial Espionage, Sounds Hot!!

Twitter uses followers/following to build community networks and allow users to keep up to date with others (you should already know this and know how it works from reading part 1 of this series, you read that already right?). Now, in addition to your random friend’s musings about his miserable life, you can easily keep track of your industry, and have a great excuse for your boss when he catches you tweeting all day! Following colleagues both in your company and working for competitors allows you to stay up on what people are saying and doing in your industry and what your competitors are up to. We will go into ways to accomplish this next week.

Sometimes Any News Is NOT Good News!

An old PR saying say “Any news is good news.” Well, in the age of the internet and the long lasting effects of reviews and comments posted on the web, this is not always true anymore. A lot of businesses and brands are clueless to the chatter about them on the web. From websites, to blogs, to message board forums, people have lots of channels and opportunities to praise or trash your business or brand. Brand Management is a hot up-and-coming area of internet marketing consulting (which I can help you with by the way), and it is something that is very important. Frequently, by the time a business hears about all the negative chatter about them on the web, it is too late and the damage is done. Mindshare is important, and on the internet businesses and brands are much more susceptible to negative PR than in the real world, all it takes is a few well placed words with the wrong message to start the brush fire of negativity. Twitter is a great tool for tracking your name and your brand, allowing you the ability to rapidly respond to issues and rumors quickly.

Be The Master Of Your Domain

Knowledge is power, or at least the perception of knowledge, and nowhere is this more evident than on the internet. As a matter of fact, the blogoshere is FULL of dummies who have everyone fooled into thinking they are geniuses. I guess in a way even those dummies are pretty smart for figuring out how to fool everyone else and their perceptions. If you can build yourself up as an authority on a subject or niche, everything you say in regard to that subject is deemed as valuable. Twitter has sprouted a whole collection of authority figures and thought leaders, people who can shape the way others think or perceive a brand or business.

There you Have It

These are but a few of the reasons why you should care about twitter and why you should be using it (either yourself or through a consultant like me!) to establish, market, and promote yourself, your business, or your brand. Twitter is unique to social networks because it doesn’t really have any competitors for the core of what it is and what it can do. By this point if my blogs have done what they were supposed to do, you now see how it can be an extremely effective tool in your business toolbox.

There is no doubt that even if you are pretty far removed from what is the cutting edge of the internet that you have still heard of twitter. With all of the headlines and news out there referring to it, and your friends and co-workers (and more importantly competitors) using it, you had to have at least heard the name, and you are probably wondering what exactly a twitter is. Well, good news folks, I am going to give you all a three part series on twitter. I am going to cover “The WHAT, The WHY, and The HOW” of twitter. And by the end of the three part series, you will have a firm understanding of what this whole twitter business is about, why you should be thinking of using it, and how to go about dipping your toe into this most powerful of social networking tools to increase traffic to your site or help promote and market your business.

Part 1, What is Twitter

Ok, so enough with the pitch for my services, lets get down to brass tacks here and get you up to tweet speed! This will be a three part series, today in Part 1 I am going to give an overview of what twitter is. At the end of this piece you will be able to:

• Hop onto the twitter site and sign up an account (it’s free, we love free!)
• Send a few tweets out
• Reply to other people’s tweets
• Search across all of twitter for info
• Understand what all the @ and # mean

What The %#$^ is a Twitter Anyway?

Ok, when people try to describe twitter, you hear terms like “microblog” and “social network” get tossed around, but does that really describe what twitter is, and does that help you with understanding this whole twitter nonsense? Nope. Here is the thing, geeks are great at making technology, geeks are great at using technology, but not a lot of geeks are particularly suited to EXPLAINING technology. Case in point, look at this definition of twitter from wikipedia:

The 5th and 6th words, there they are, social network and micro blog, lol, I swear I didn’t even go to that page yet when I wrote above about those terms! Anyway, at its most basic, if other services like facebook answer the question of “who are your friends” and linkedin answers the question “what do you do for a living” then twitter answers the question “what are you up to right now.”

Say Anything, Say Everything, Just Keep It Under 140 Characters!

Now, while some people use blogs to discuss about their personal lives, their jobs, or a bunch of other things that may or may not be of interest to anyone else in an informal journalistic way with paragraphs, images, and video, twitter only gives you 140 characters, and that includes the spaces between words and punctuation! So while you might get on a blog and type out an essay of a few hundred words about Michael Jackson’s death, you can get on twitter and just blurt out a quick sentence about it. And the power of that is by the time your blog is finished and posted to your site, hundreds of thousands of tweets have gone out mentioning his death. In this way, twitter has become the quickest news headline disseminator out there. So this seemingly limited functionality of 140 characters actually works to an advantage for twitter. More on the Why’s of using twitter in my next part in this series, lets get back to the What.

Signing Up, So Easy a Caveman Can Do it

Signing up for twitter is really simple and very quick as well as free, there is no reason to not give it a shake. Here are the quick instructions(these are the current directions for signing up, it may change at some point but I am sure it will be roughly the same so don’t worry about it):

1. Go to www.twitter.com
2. Click sign up now
3. Enter your name (can be an alias if you want)
4. username (this will be the handle everyone sees and uses, so nothing embaressing please!),
5. password
6. email (should be a real email address)
7. enter the security codes to prove you are a human
8. Click create my account
9. The next few pages you can just click skip at the bottom

Congrats, you are now a part of the twitterverse!

Got The Keys, Let’s Drive!

Ok, now that you are signed in, you will see a text box up top and a sidebar on the right. The first tweet people usually send is something along the lines of “hey I just signed up for this!” Yeah, most people aren’t too creative, but i digress. Anyway, go ahead and type something. While you are typing you will notice on top of the box there is a number that starts at 140 and decreases with every keystroke you enter. You can not go below 0 or it will show a negative number and will NOT allow you to send the tweet.

Alright, now we are cooking with gas, you have signed up, logged in, and just posted your first tweet! Congats, you just learned how to do something your 12 year old does while waiting to jump into the next round of Gears of War on xbox live, lol! Now that we have gotten this far, you should probably try and find a friend. If you know someone’s twitter user name you can just go to it by typing www.twitter.com/username. If you don’t know the username you can click “find people” up top. Once on that screen you can type in names of people to find them, or if you use gmail, aol, or yahoo mail and have people stored you can click “find on other networks” or finally you can invite them to twitter by email. You can also add me, I am TheJM3Group. As you find a profile for a friend, you can click “follow” to have them instantly added to your list of people you follow.

Now we have signed up, posted our first tweet, and added some friends. At this point once you add friends and click home, you will be viewing your feed.Your feed is in chronological order with the most recent tweet first, showing what you are posting and what any of your friends (the people you follow) have posted. Each one of these tweets starts out with the username of the person this tweet was written by, which also functions as a clickable link to that person’s page. You may notice a few odd things inside some people’s tweets, like text strings  that start with #, or usernames that start with @ or url links that look like nonsense. I will explain those below.

Ok, so now that you know what the funny symbols mean, let me explain the sidebar on the right better. Here are the highlights of the sidebar.

• Under home you will see @yourusername. You can click on this to see if anyone has tweeted and mentioned you, like in the examples I gave you for the @ symbol above.
• Next comes Direct Messages. If you want to send a message to someone that is following you that you want to be private, you type d username message, like “d @thejm3group lets go out tonight.” That would get sent to my direct messages and nobody viewing your feed or my feed would see it. You would click direct messages to view it.
• A little ways down you will see a search box, here is where you can enter in a hashtag, like #jetscamp, to see any message about a certain topic. You can also type in anything you want to search for in twitter feeds by anyone.

There you have it

You now have the basics of what twitter is. You have opened an account, added a friend or two and even made your first tweet. The fun part begins when you start adding friends and seeing their friends and following new people. Try to find as many business associates as well and follow them, you will probably pick up valuable info about your customers, competitors, and industry. And trust me, after the next two parts of this series it will be made even more clear what exactly the power of twitter is and what it can do for you and/or your business or job.

WWW.TimelessDJs.com

The Evaluation

We just finished up a website for a client of ours, Timeless Entertainment(TE). TE is a mobile DJ, event entertainment company. Peter, one of the owners of the company, was the point man for this project. Like a lot of companies venturing onto the internet for the first time, Peter wasn’t exactly sure of what they wanted. We asked Peter all types of questions about their business, the types of parties they work, the types of clients they have and more importantly the types they don’t have, and a list of competitors. We took all of that information along with the impression we got of Peter and his company as a hip, young firm, and came up with a game plan for a site to best express who they are. When we handed the proposal off to them with what we thought they needed, they were on board 100% and off we went.

The Process

The build process started with a rough frame of the pages that would make the site up and the basic navigation structure. Next we worked on the color scheme and fine tuned the design through css to make the site load quickly and efficiently on all browsers, including iphones. Flash and other gimmicks were thrown out the door in favor of a great clean site that would be search engine friendly and get the clients to the information they needed as quickly as possible. We then came up with a logo concept based off a logo they already had, and came up with a great background to make the site pop and speak to the web surfer about TE as a young, hip company. At the moment TE is a little light on content for the site, but forward thinking did go into the design to accept a lot more content as they create it.

Some of the interesting design elements:

• Past Parties: we made a blog page that will showcase some of the parties that TE has done. The main page shows small teasers of each post, which when clicks opens to a page with a full sized post where they can put any text they want talking about the party, as well as a slick image gallery and video if they choose.
• Recent Posts: on the sidebar we display the 5 most recent party posts, along with a thumbnail pic. These are generated automatically when the client enters a new post in the Past Parties page.
• Song List: we set up a page with some lists of songs for the most important wedding moments. In addition to just listing the songs, we made them links directly to the itunes store where the surfer can here legal song samples without having to buy anything.
• Contact Form: when a surfer fills out the contact form, it immediately goes right to Peter’s email on his phone, allowing him the ability to get in touch and follow up on the lead in moments.

As part of the package of services Peter selected, we added the SEO(search engine optimization) package. This included going back through the site, and adding the meta information for every site along with a few other tweaks to the code. We also installed analytics tracking software to view and keep on top of how his site is used and webmaster tools to see how google sees his site. We also handled submitting to the search engines and creating a dynamic sitemap that updates whenever the site is updated to help google index the site quickly. Also, building the site on a highly seo optimized framework and forgoing the gimmicks like Flash means this site is set up perfectly for both users and search engines.

The next step

The next step for TE and The JM3 Group after the summer rush in TE’s business is to work on marketing, using the social networks to really get the brand out there. We will also review how the site has performed in the search engines and offer a recommendation on how it can be improved.

WWW.WholesalePashminaScarves.com

The Evaluation

The client, HBC, had an existing eccommerce website for their main business, handbags, where they also sold scarves. After seeing the handbag side of the business declining during the downturn in the economy, they realized that their scarf business was not really being affected by the downturn and surprisingly was increasing. They brought The JM3 Group in to evaluate the current site, the way HBC does business, the way they interact with customers, and the competitors to HBC’s business.

After doing research and brainstorming with the client, The JM3 Group came up with a gameplan that involved spinning off the scarf business as a seperate entity, locating a great website domain name, building a more modern and robust ecommerce site, incorporating an email newsletter marketing campaign, and designing, implementing, and actively managing a google adwords advertising campaign.

The Process

After hearing about HBC’s previous problems with flakey web developers building custom sites then refusing to support them, and the type of budget HBC was working with, it was decided that this new site would use a solid cart package that had all of the features wanted and could be customized to their specifications. The result was a clean, well organized site with some slick features, like customer accounts, multiple shipping addresses, product image zooming, customer order history, integrated shipping features, and strong seo underpininngs.

Areas The JM3 Group worked on

• Web Design: We create a site with all of the features of the most modern enterprise class ecommerce sites.
• Logo Design: As a wholesale company, their goal is to be a silent partner to their customers, to go along with that they wanted a nice clean font based logo along with an icon.
• Photography: Shooting a fabric product like scarves is not an easy task when you are trying to convey the quality of the fabric and the various subtle color differences. The JM3 Group brought in their professional photographer to shoot all of the product shots for the launch.
• SEO: Normally a new site can take a few weeks to a few months of complet obscurity online as google places it in their “sandbox.” Through SEO (search engine optimization) techniques we employed, we saw the site go from nowhere to page 15 within 2 days on google search, and from there to the top 5 on the front page within 1 week for the most relevent keyowrds. This led directly to new business as we saw new customers finding the site and ordering, and as a matter of fact, in the last month HBC says they have received over 60% more new orders per week than they normally do, this does not include the orders we are tracking through the paid advertising campaign.
• Google advertising: We set up an adwords account and tested various text ads to find the best click through rates. We are seeing click through rates of around 10% a week which is a huge number. We are also able to track which orders coming in are directly from the advertising campaign through analytics software. With the information the analytics software provides, we can see how much we are spending per click, and how much business each click brings un, to determine how successful the campaign is. This is powerful information
• Email marketing: We set up an email marketing campaign for HBC and trained them in best practices for dealing with email marketeering. The campaign utilizes high quality html based emails that include graphics and links. These links can be tracked to see exacty how many people are clicking, how many people are opening the email, and how many are bouncing. It also includes the ability for subscribers to automatically unsubscribe, a legal requirement under CAN-SPAM.
• Hosting: Rather than search out sitable hosting for the site, we were able to offer them a turnkey site with affordable hosting.

The Next Step

We are planning on working with HBC to integrate some social networks into the picture. As a wholesale company, they don’t benefit as much from direct marketing to the public, and this might hurt their relationship with their retailer customers, so the gameplan is to use the appropriate tools like twitter to act as a kind of quick broadcaster to all of their current customers, keeping them up to date with new product announcements and special promotions.