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GastownDesigns.com presents some quirky concepts with their new line of Le Doosh™ t-shirts and apparel… check out their current products available in the US & Canada!
It’s Too Hot to be a Dooshbag
(US store)
It’s Too Hot to be a Dooshbag
(Canadian store)
To quote Buddha, “Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit; even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”
Putting an end to cancer is a team effort. The impact we can make together is much greater than what any of us could do alone…
Our head honcho and SEO consultant, Karin Pinter, was recently named Online Chair for the 2011 Relay For Life of Beverly Hills, which launches its 2011 fund-raising campaign on September 2nd, 2010 at:
El Torito Mexican Grill
9595 Wilshire Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA
This event is being held in conjunction with the 9.02.10 Day celebrations that will be taking place in Beverly Hills, and we are expecting a large turn-out. We welcome you to join us and RSVP here.
Relay For Life is the American Cancer Society’s signature activity. It offers everyone within a community the opportunity to participate in the efforts to put an end to cancer. Teams of people fund-raise and camp out at a local high school, park, or fairground and take turns walking or running around a track or path. Each Relay For Life team is asked to have a team member on the track at all times during the event. Relays are 24 hours in length; representing the reality that cancer never sleeps. The 2011 Relay For Life of Beverly Hills team will be setting up camp at El Rodeo School.
Join our Facebook Page to receive updates on upcoming events, schedules, how to join our team and create your own!
2011 Volunteer Committee Members
Chairman: Jeromy Meyer ~ Team Sheridan Care
Co-Chair: Nicole Schulte
Online Chair: Karin Pinter
Survivor Chair: Brittany Walter
Team Captains
Team Sheridan Care: Jeromy Meyer
Please contact our Event Chair, Jeromy Meyer, at Sheridan In-Home Health Care at (310) 204-1187 for more information about this event of for information about how to volunteer, put a team together or for info about events coming up.
By joining or donating to our team, you will be a part of a life-changing event that gives everyone in the community a chance to celebrate the lives of people who have battled cancer, remember lost loved ones, and fight back against a disease that takes too much. By joining our Facebook Page, you will have access and immediate updates on events, join our team, make donations, and help us create a world with less cancer and more birthdays.
(Source: www.relayforlife.org)
The American Cancer Society is the nationwide, community-based, voluntary health organization dedicated to eliminating cancer as a major health problem by preventing cancer, saving lives, and diminishing suffering from cancer, through research, education, advocacy, and service.
Your involvement with the American Cancer Society Relay For Life is essential to supporting our mission to defeat cancer once and for all.
The financial support you provide is invested wisely. 75% of funds raised in CA was spent on national and California based research, prevention, early detection, treatment, and patient support services. Learn more about how your donation will help save lives in California.
So, after spewing out a bunch of monthly SEO reports for our clients early in the week, we also just uploaded www.stephaniestraining.com with some color updates, as well as a complete SEO audit. You can see an outline of what we did over here.
These days, helping charities has become so easy with tools like Paypal Donate and online credit card payment facilities. It’s hardly an excuse now not to drop a few bucks into their kitty, unless you’re really tight on your own budget, which I can respect. Just remember that every effort counts towards completing the bigger picture.
Some friends in Vancouver recently reached out to their friends and community to showcase some of their charitable work, so I thought I would share this with you too in an effort to provide additional awareness of their cause.
Shahada – A Society For Uniting Children with Parents, is a Registered Charitable Organization in Canada. Their goal is to raise $100,000 to fund various projects in Pakistan, which include:
Maternity Care, Hostel & Orphanage
There are areas of the world today in which the life of an unwed mother is intolerable. Without access to orphanages, desperate mothers are left with no choice but to do the unthinkable. One of Shahada’s primary goals is to provide orphanages in these areas and give these mothers another choice…
For a number of years Shahada has supported an orphanage in Gilgit, Pakistan, which cared for abandoned babies and facilitated international adoptions. Then Shahada decided it was time to start something new and self-sustainable.
“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”
With this new concept for the orphanage, and unlike other facilities in the area, all pregnant women will be offered maternity care at this facility – whether or not they are married. Confidential care and residence will be available for women needing shelter and protection during this vulnerable time. Unwed mothers will also be given the choice to place their child for adoption, in which case their child will be housed and cared for in the orphanage until adoption can be facilitated. Consistent with Shahada’s philosophy, income generated from the maternity care and delivery center will be used to support the on-going costs of the center.
How you can support the Orphanage & Maternity Care
You can make specific donations to help Shahada set the foundations for this self-sustaining project and save abandoned newborns by helping them purchase and pay for:
Ultrasound Unit
Medical Equipment
Medical Staff
Queen Academy
Shahada has gained local acceptance for their institution by supporting a local initiative in Chitral – a school that generates fees by a self-sustaining project of making and selling honey, called the Queen Academy.
At the beginning of the school year, every child is given a honey bee box. The families are taught how to make honey and with Shahada’s support, they are then able to sell the honey. The income generated by selling this organic, mountain-grown honey is enough to pay for the entire school fees for the following year (and then some!).
This highly successful, low cost, self-sustaining micro-finance project has led Shahada to use this model to create funds for other primary care needs such as health care, insurance and housing. At this time, this community needs 100 more honeybee boxes.
How you can support the Queen Academy
Scholarships – Shahada will be providing academic scholarships for the 20 most deserving students. For $4900, you could be the one to support this initiative. Shahada is also filling the gap in pay to increase teacher-retention by means of Teacher Scholarships.
Honey Bee Boxes – With a $10,500 gift you could be the Legacy Donor who educates 100 children for the long and multiplying life of the honeybee boxes.
Every Little Bit Counts
We encourage you to join us in support of Shahada’s commendable cause by providing financial aid to their projects – any and all donations are welcome.
For more information, visit www.shahada.ca
I’m a firm believer in hogging your online identity, be it through purchasing a domain name with your personal name, as well as maintaining a streamlined means of communicating with your online followers. It builds consistency and recognition across various platforms, as well as protecting your overall presence.
As you plug into all the different networks, try to keep this in the same format you may already be using for Twitter and other social networking accounts you manage, as it streamlines your online presence to help people remember and look you up later.
A few examples to get you started…
Your Company Domain Name
Registering a few variations of this generally won’t burn the budget, so feel free to buy a handful of domains if you feel that your company may benefit from securing a little more brand protection for itself. You can redirect those you’re not using to the one you choose to develop your site on.
Changing your URL on Facebook
If you run a Business Page, you can change the URL from the default settings provided when you registered it in the first place, although you will need to have at least 25 fans before you can make this change, so start sharing your Page with everyone! Simply go to:
http://www.facebook.com/username/
After you’ve done that, remember to update any other links to your Facebook Page from your site/s, email signatures, social media pages, etc. to reflect this new URL.
Also, if you don’t have a website (call us… ehem), you can create a Facebook Business Page to build additional online presence for your business & services.
Being on Twitter doesn’t mean being a twit
You may not tweet as much as your neighbor next door, and its basic character limitations may be frustrating at times… yet if you’re putting your brand online, make sure you secure this too. After all, you wouldn’t want someone to ‘take’ your intended twitter name and confuse prospective clients? Even if you’re not using it on a daily basis, it’s great for redirecting visitors to your site for full news and updates, or sharing other sites & articles that reference your business.
eg:Â twitter.com/muttmaniacs
Yelp
Most businesses are built through word of mouth referrals. Yelp is a fantastic resource to generate this same type of online buzz for your business, since people post reviews on Yelp pages as a means of sharing their insights and discoveries. It is therefore an excellent tool to compile online testimonials and build brand recognition by which people will feel more encouraged to engage in business with you. If the web is all about conversation, then you’ll certainly find people talking about you on Yelp! As I mentioned on our section for Facebook, Yelp is also a handy platform on which to create a listing on if you do not have a website of your own. It provides you with a search engine friendly avenue by which your clients and potential clients can find you online.
eg:Â http://www.yelp.com/biz/mutt-maniacs-los-angeles
Business Networking Sites (because the net… works…)
You may be part of BNI, YPO or other such business networking collectives. Make sure you keep your company profile up to date so that others in your direct network can be sure to find you when they need to refer business to you.
Connecting all the dots…
So, once you have all of these bits and pieces in place, you can connect your blog with your Twitter account, and your Facebook Business Page updates too. This way, posting in one place will populate all your other accounts in one fell swoop. It will also populate the search engines with more references about you, so that when people ‘Google’ your business name they will come across something like this:
Et voila… stay tuned for more tips about building and maintaining and online presence.
Going green can be fun and focused, and Vancouver’s newest eco site, Greener Steps, aims to show you just how.
Vancouver, BC - There’s a new website being launched that’s sure to please all environmentally conscious individuals and businesses alike. Greener Steps is a site designed especially to promote green entrepreneurship and sustainable development. It’s one of the only sites available that will combine membership and non membership benefits, to make learning and interacting fun and profitable.
Greener Steps is the brainchild of local social worker and environmental lobbyist Alex Sangha. Says Alex of his latest venture, “As a young adult, I travelled to Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Victoria Falls as part of a United Nations tour of Africa, and upon my return, I delivered presentations to high school students to make them more aware of the fragile nature of our environment. It’s from here, early on, I realized the need to take things one step further, and get the entire community to understand the urgency of protecting our environment. My vision for Greener Steps is to get people to commit to a greener planet through a unique, single channel, which is accessible to all.”
Greener Steps does not simply ask its members to commit, it offers them the tools to do so, by providing them with a place to promote their goods and services, a forum to discuss current issues, and newsletter and email blasts to deliver information people need to make sustainable choices.
Greener Steps offers a lot of services to the public such as free listings in the Eco-directory, Eco-discounts, Eco-marketplace, and Eco-jobs.
FREE Membership to the site entails you to receive:
• Discounts, deals, and special offers on local goods and services.
• Your website link on the Greener Steps Eco-directory.
• The opportunity to buy, sell, or trade environmentally friendly goods and services in our Eco-marketplace.
• The Greener Steps monthly newsletter.
• The chance to list upcoming events you may be hosting on the Greener Steps calendar.
• The chance to forge community partnerships, and participate in promotions with Greener Steps.
• Check out job postings from environmentally friendly companies and organizations.
You will also have FREE access to various networking services such as:
• Member Chat
• Member Profiles
• Member Forums
• Member News
You will have the opportunity to take advantage of Greener Steps paid services such as the Eco-newswire. This newswire allows you to send messages to over 70 media outlets in British Columbia, over 450 eco-businesses and organizations in the Greener Steps private database, and to over 10,000 (and growing) social media contacts.
Adds Alex, “Simply talking about the environment is not enough to raise awareness, we need to take action. And we hope that Greener Steps can create a socially responsible means for members, shoppers, and visitors alike, to make a positive impact on the environment”.
Membership is free to all and a paid service comes with additional privileges, like access to the company’s extensive database of eco-friendly businesses and organizations and being featured on the company’s newsletters and website.
Greener Steps will also donate up to 25% of the money it receives via sponsorships to a green charity of your choice.
Check out Vancouver’s newest eco-website, Greener Steps, at: www.greenersteps.com
For more details on how you can participate, please contact:
Alex Sangha, BSW (UBC), MSc (London School of Economics)
Founder and President, Greener Steps
Fax: (604) 628-3841
Email: info@greenersteps.com
Website: www.greenersteps.com
So, you have a marketing agency that focuses on your branding and copywriting, a web designer who controls your website, perhaps a programmer who does magic with your database to pool your leads into your CRM, an independent Pay Per Click agency administrating your sponsored listings on search engines, and finally an SEO consultant optimizing your carefully drafted content, adjusting your site code, and monitoring your traffic through Google Analytics, which is connected to your PPC.
Ideally, everybody involved with your website would have some sort of dialogue between them, so that each ‘cook’ is able to facilitate one another’s work while at the same time focusing on their requirements to provide you, the client, with the ultimate service and results. After all, that’s what you’re paying each person for, right?
Well, what happens when one or some of these elements stops communicating, or neglects to engage in conversation to begin with? Not one of those providers is more important than the other, if you look at the big picture. Regardless of their experience and expertise, they must all be professional enough to communicate their needs to one another for your overall benefit as their client. Whether or not they are comfortable with it, each one is somehow ‘married’ to the others for the duration of their contract with you. So I would encourage you to ensure that all your service providers, if they are not all within the same organization, genuinely facilitate one another’s tasks, knowing that somehow they all overlap at one point or another. Otherwise your marketing manager will always ask your web designer to revert the text your SEO consultant updated with new keywords, and your PPC manager may forget to inform your SEO consultant that they changed the code for them to run their reports to show performance. Meanwhile, your programmer may well sit back and watch over everything dumbfounded (since he’s the one managing your database with those precious leads that the SEO & PPC managers are avidly generating for you), shake his head and say, “Sort yourselves out and call me when you’re done.”
If any of your service providers shares their uneasiness with you over how the other members of your marketing team are treating them, do please remember that your responsibility as a client (meaning, to yourself ultimately) is to make sure that they are all in active agreement over one thing – getting their jobs done for you, while at the same time enabling everyone else’s tasks.
Otherwise your budget may well burn up faster than planned, thus undermining your business’s goals and expectations.
This video is amazing. It was submitted in a contest by a 20-year old to the “u @ 50″ AARP contest and won second place.
A palindrome reads the same backwards as it does forward, which is exactly how this video reads. However, the meaning when read backwards is the complete opposite.
It’s less than 2 minutes long – watch and listen to the whole thing…
A website can be well optimized for a particular industry, but what happens when two seemingly unrelated industries cross over? You get a whole bunch of traffic you really don’t want… and a funny language dilemma.
While reviewing a client’s traffic and keyword reports for April, a strange peak in their site’s visitor trends caught my attention. Towards the middle of the month, their traffic increased dramatically, then returned to its normal pattern. No new content had been added to their site during that time, no newsletters were sent out, and their last blog post of March 31 would, if anything, have shown a more immediate increase in traffic within the first few days afterward, not 16 days later.
So, I revised the keywords for those days during which traffic soared, and realized that a significant amount of the terms by which traffic was reaching the site were not related to the client’s industry whatsoever (unless you stretch your imagination a little).
The client in question is a life coach in London, providing additional consultations in Barcelona & Madrid. The site is optimized and positioned for ‘life coach’ and ‘life coaching’ in these three cities so as to reach those particular audiences.
Now, generally people in England travel by ‘coach’, not by ‘bus’ (this is where the language cross-over potentially affects traffic). So on occasion, I’ve noticed random visits from people searching for ‘coaches from london to barcelona’ filter through to the website – so few they were of no real consequence, and somewhat inevitable by the sheer nature of how search engines can regurgitate their own keyword references by which to rank a given page.
Then I remembered that the volcanic eruption in Iceland occurred mid-April, and realised that during those days, when travellers in Europe were unable to travel by air and resorted to travelling by land, the resulting traffic to our client’s site was in fact a direct correlation in related searches for ‘coaches from london to spain’, ‘coaches from barcelona to london’ or ‘coaches madrid to london’. Obviously a coach with wheels and a coach with a plan of action will get you from A to B somehow… yet this was not the kind of traffic our client was looking for. The volume of demand to cover that isolated need, however, temporarily outweighed the searches for our client’s specific offering.
This simply goes to show that no matter how well optimized your site may be for your particular industry, if your terms are similar to those of another kind of service, you may still get undesired traffic that may send clouds over your results (pun intended).
Have coffee? Read a few more SEO articles...
What are your feelings about the digital world, and how it is shaping our thought and business processes?
Don Tapscott, Canadian business executive and co-author of Wikinomics and The Naked Corporation, discusses key points about the evolving role of technology in business and modern society.
Thanks to Fraser Dodge for sharing this on AbsoluteMagazine.co.za.
Things that entertain us when we’re taking a little break from work…
Our friend Jason Romaine highlights some of his latest comedic moments at the LA Comedy Festival.
To view more online comedy videos from Jason Romaine, visit:
www.thecomedydoctors.com/profile/jasonromaine/
Los Angeles, CA (NVISION PR) — As part of our continued development in relationship marketing, Nvision Media Group has registered its personal travel portal with TrotHop, for an in-house streamlined and cost-effective online travel and accommodation booking process.
You can visit our travel site here: http://nvisionmedia.trothop.com and welcome you to bookmark this page accordingly.
Our TrotHop site is powered by the Travelocity Partner Network, and provides all the general online flight & hotel reservation facilities, as well as travel guides and vacation packages.
Why did we do it? With over 60 airlines, 55,000 hotels and resorts and 28 rental car companies, we’re pretty sure we’ll find the perfect match for our travel needs to go see clients, visit friends, or take that funny thing called a ‘vacation’ (oooooh). And since we spend so much time in front of our computer, it’s so much easier to do this online…
It also means we get a bonus (aka ‘more cookies’) if we book our own flights and vacations!
Want to know how you can do this too? Call or email us today.
Luxury lifestyle publication, Absolute Magazine, recently made the decision to take a digital leap and become a true online lifestyle offering.
By going digital, Absolute Magazine has been able to incorporate far more interactivity than a traditional print publication. The publication has expanded its content base from an editorial one to include a social network and a Web TV channel which features content from each of the sections in the magazine.
Publisher, Fraser Dodge, sees the step as an essential one, commenting that “far from being a radical shift, it is more of a logical progression. With the world moving towards convergence at every level, we decided the time was right to lead the charge in a South African context.”
Absolute Magazine has all facets of social media, video and magazine editorial under one URL, offering a one-stop web address that can cater to a great number of internet users’ needs. In addition, Absolute makes innovative use of Twitter as a breaking news feed to their home page. This allows you to stay in tune with what is happening around the world from the leading news providers like CNN, BBC, iafrica and News24.
On the social network, Absolute Magazine has introduced a user points system that allows you to move up the social ladder and get exclusive event invites and products based on your interactivity with the network. The plan is to move this on to a platform where you can also redeem your points for goods in an online store.
The Web TV portion of the site celebrates South Africa with a focus on businesses and artists from home soil, with the usual international references that influence our habits and behaviours. The music videos are currently strictly South African, but Dodge does not rule out international content in the future. “It all depends on what the users want us to publish,” he says. “While we are keen to celebrate what we have locally, if the community expresses an overwhelming preference for international content, we will have no choice but to comply.”
As a social media platform, Absolute Magazine offers a comprehensive view of what is possible when a publication embraces a digital world. By not compromising on their quality of content, but enhancing and growing it in line with current international trends, they offer a social media opportunity that is difficult to ignore.
More Info:
Absolute Magazine Publishers
T: 021 671 2418
www.absolutemagazine.co.za
info@absolutemagazine.co.za
Oh the joys of great marketing…
Absolutely loved this one, had to watch it twice…
‘Vancouver City’ video is a collaboration between Innerlife Project and TimeLapseHD. Linda Ganzini’s beautiful and haunting vocals blend with the unique musical style of Serge Chubinski-Orlov who produced and wrote Vancouver City. For more information and music downloads, go to www.innerlifeproject.com.
Notes from the creators:
The time lapses were shot with a 12 mega pixel digital single lens reflex cameras. Original resolution is 6 times better than HD (high definition). The images have been resized for HD and are much better quality then shown here on YouTube. Video clips are for sale. For more information contact us at TimeLapseHD@hotmail.com.
The first decade of the 21st century is coming to an end. Your business is suffering setbacks due to stiff competition and the economic crisis. You need an injection of new clients. You’ve tried everything to promote your business in magazines, newspapers, radio and TV… You even rented a billboard next to a one-dimensional bull placed at the top of a mountain. But somehow, something is still missing. What do you do? Set your sights on that fierce and faithful world known as the Internet.
Yes, we know, you already have a website. But apart from your colleagues, family and friends, how many people actually know it exists? How can you drive more traffic to your site in order to make ends meet? In reality, it’s really very simple. Hire an expert in what is called search engine optimization to do a little magic on your website (white, of course) so that it starts to appear in the top positions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
1. First define the keywords that visitors will use to find your service or products on the internet and that best match the content on the website. You can start adjusting the text on your website in order to whet the appetite of search engine spiders that trawl the net and read websites for relevant content. They are obviously not real spiders, but rather programs that read websites like little detectives.
2. Adjust your META tags (title, keywords and description) to match the content of each page. This is like naming the chapters in a book, and is another aspect that search engine spiders look out for.
3. Create a sitemap that offers both human visitors and search engine spiders a quick glimpse of all the pages on the site, similar to the index page in an instruction manual.
4. Keywords should also be included into the alt tags that appear on the images within our web page. Remember, every little thing counts!
5. After giving your site a general spring cleaning, you need to start campaigning for votes. This is a process that involves a little give and take. You need to search for sites that are relevant to your content or industry, and ask them to link back to you. You can also achive these backlinks by being actively involved in forums and posting comments related to your activity. The idea is to be present and involved in sites related to your subject in order that search engines recognize your site as credible.
Every now and then search engines modify the criteria by which they rank sites. This is why you need someone to be up to date in order to make amendments to the site as required.
No pain, no gain. That said, I am often surprised by how quickly a website achieve a high ranking with hardly any effort at all. You need to follow various steps and rituals in order to establish your presence on that podium. Just like you need to take care of yourself, you need to take care of your website.
Some SEO experts will cheat and try to fool search engines in order to get to the top as quickly as possible. Using tricks can potentially harm your business and often backfire in the long run. In the world of search engine optimization we call these people black hat SEOs and search engines are quick to punish their sites. Those who work with a clean code and ethical mentality are called white hat SEOs.
Obviously, no good magician will ever divulge his or her secrets. But I can tell you about some of the basic tools you can use to help you optimize your site:
· Choose your keywords carefully and ensure they relate to the content of your site and the service you provide.
· Create META tags for each page.
· Review and adjust your content to include keywords.
· Review and adjust the source code so that it loads our optimized content faster and more efficiently.
· Link strategy – Develop your presence on search engines through other established sites (eg. local directories, industry-specific sites, blogs, forums, facebook, digg …).
· Frequently analyse your traffic, visitor tendencies and search engine rankings in order to assess your progress.
If you don’t know who is visiting your website, you won’t know which strategy is working. To do this you need to install software on your server (most hosting companies already have these tools set up for you to use) or sign up to Google Analytics. You can use the resulting statistics in order to see the number of visitors to your site, and discover where they are coming from. These statistics give you an idea of user habits, increases and decreases in traffic, and will also show you which keywords users are using to get to your site. This information is vital for anyone interested in marketing their website.
There are many books and websites containing detailed information on how to develop your knowledge about search engine optimization. But, unless you have the time to study, apply and keep up to date with the industry, then you should probably find an expert to take charge so you can concentrate on developing your business. Search Engine Optimization is a tedious and time-consuming process. Unless you are on a tight budget, or have lots of time to spare, leave it to the experts.
Originally posted on TertuliaAndaluza.com
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