TopSoft Design Studio’s Managed Plans

Photo compliments of Matt Hamm

I originally began this article because I was asked to do a dinner presentation on Social Media. Someone was looking for a social media guru and thought of me. I have to admit I believe I don’t match the guru aspect of that compliment but I accept it!

My point is, social media is a beast that changes daily and can not be measured by one man, nor can it be completely contained in a single blog, or a website, or weeks of research! Social media has changed the face of the earth. It has evolved how human beings communicate, torn down cultural, racial and societal barriers. Social media has opened doors that no man can shut.

I’m taking some of the statistics I’m going to point out from many other sources. A noteworthy link is Jake Hird’s blog, which you can find at http://econsultancy.com/blog/5324-20+-mind-blowing-social-media-statistics-revisited.

The truth of it is, the numbers are mind-boggling and because it’s so rapidly changing, you can only review data from months prior to get an impression of today and tomorrow. Consider some of these following tid-bits of data and think of what it could do for your online campaign…

1. Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
2. Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
3. LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.

These numbers are astonishing but what strikes me the most is actually using these services! I’ve always been reluctant to use social media as a person. As a business I’m loving it. But I feel like social media is a smoking gun. We can claim all day long that guns are terrible and should be banned. I think that’s wrong. Guns are a tool and have served man well for hundreds of years.

Unfortunately some bad people have guns too and bad people have social media too. When I finally gave up and made a twitter account ( today! ) I received a follower before I even tweeted! Someone named Alyssa24 was looking for a strong man posted a link to some online pics, which I did not click.

Aside from the personal ‘trash’ that floats around every fad, think about the impacts of social media on business networking however! Take Apple and PC for instance. There aren’t viruses on Mac’s. That’s because it’s a very small percentage of the market. The fad is still cheap PC’s. Mac’s are the ‘upper class’…

The market is all over social media. That means there are lots of viruses. But it also means there are more clients, lots and lots of them!

Consider:

1. There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
2. About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
3. More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.

Did you catch that??? 70% of Facebook users are NOT U.S. citizens! For all of us here in the U.S. we can expand to a global market.

What if I don’t want a global market? Every aspect of social media provides a refinement process to market to your local market. But think about this… In my article about Searching the Search Engine I talked about getting in-bound links to your website. Imagine the power of having a tweet link to your website daily? How about having 500 friends on Facebook linking to your website?

Every blog article I put in a link to my website, www.topsoftdesignstudio.com which constitutes a friendly in-bound link! What if you could get 50 new people looking your website? It would take about 5 days to get a couple hundred friends on Facebook. If you post to their wall a link to your website with a valid reason to look, imagine the power of advertising??

Social media is amazing! It’s a tool. It can be bad, it can be good and many people can argue both directions. It’s a tool that has caused the world to step back and look at what’s happening. An explosion in communication and personal marketing is creating entirely new markets. Take advantage of this phenomenon and jump into the social media world with open eyes. Expect great things and expect lots of spam!

Some people try too hard...

Some people try WAY to hard to make an impact. Subtility has often been attributed with making the greatest impacts in history, culture, art, etc. People have spent lifetimes looking for subtle meanings hidden within some of the greatest artistic feats.

Websites and graphics design really isn’t all that different. With the advent of broadband, flash and the ability to woo the snot out of web visitors, some have pierced their websites and graphics with far too many holes. In the hopes to draw in attention, crazy things happen.

“why do we kill people who kill other people to show that killing people is wrong?”

Think about it. Really. Why do we kill murderers? I mean, isn’t that the epitome of hypocrisy? You are sentenced to death by lethal injection for murdering and abusing three small children and then their mother. Really? What is America coming to? What good does killing a murder do. Prove to them that killing is worth killing for?

/sarcasm off

My immediate answer is, … so the ones killing other people stop killing people! I mean come on. Do you REALLY have to ask why we remove murderers from the gene pool? Why do we take anti-bacterial medicine when we are stick? I’m not a doctor but I’m pretty sure it is to kill the bacteria that is killing our living cells and causing our sickness.

I guess if I was a good pacifist, I would spend more time talking about the virtue of really explaining to murders, terrorists and child abusers whose recidivism (likelihood to re-offend)  percentage is around 90%, why that killing is really bad. I’m also sure that if we would just take the time to explain to Osama Bin Laden that blowing up buildings that housed thousands of living souls isn’t right, or nice, or cool, then I’m sure he would stop. This man-hunt that will likely end in his death is simply proposterous. Think about Gangs. One game member kills another gang member. That sparks the victims ( we are really calling gang members victims??? ) gang to retaliate and likely kill a member of the opposing gang, who then retaliates and…you get the point.

Stink! I thought I /sarcasm off’d. It somehow slipped back on.

If, in this great United States of America, we truly have a generation coming that is asking why we are stopping people from killing them, and their children, I desperately wonder what will be next? I won’t open up the gun rights can of worms…. This is just me rambling but I’m dumbfounded by the stupidity that is ramping up on a grand scale! *sigh*

• Informational
• Creative
• eCommerce

These are my own variations to the popular terms, but in essence, that’s it. What boggles me is that somehow the consensus is that the Creative style site is the only one that qualifies for high-quality graphics!

This bothers me. Why is it that popular opinion says that webpages that have ALOT OF TEXT should be ugly, drab, plain and boring? WordPress, blogs, Drupal, Joomla, etc. Remember PHPNuke? Every site looked identical. Every wonder why every news organizations website looks just like the next?

I know…the link colors are different, the header shows the logo and information of that individual organization, but they are all the same! BLAH! Get creative, make it look good. Make it give people a reason to look again. Honestly, when is the last time you pulled into a fast food shack because the picture on the billboard picture actually looked like the burger that gets dumped in the bottom of the bag? Like never?

Why does the world of fashion put the top priority on perfect images formed by popular opinion?

In simplest forms, make it look good and people will want it! Have you ever eaten at McDonald’s and walked away saying MAN THAT WAS GOOD!!! Like never?

TopSoft Design Studio’s about page says nothing about how great I am. How many websites I’ve completed, how many pages of code I’ve read/written. It says that my focus is making you look good, so count on looking if you have me design your website!

http://www.topsoftdesignstudio.com

There are some real challenges that face this fast paced society and those who try to navigate the super highway. As if getting up in the morning in time to make coffee and get to work wasn’t bad enough, the world requires you now to keep your facebook account updated, tweet your latest dilemna with the washing machine AND do your job on a daily basis.

TopSoft Design Studio has found the way to overcome at least part of the challenge! Our managed website accounts provide you with options to have use fill in your blog, your tweets, facebook content and more with an easy to plan scheduled maintenance system!

Don’t let the internet rise above where you can reach! Keep www.topsoftdesignstudio.com on the top of your list for help that can save you time, money and put you back in front of your family, where you belong.

The complicated world of web-design has been reduced to a standards war between Microsoft and the rest of the free world. I say the free world because working in the confines of Microsoft is almost like being enslaved! Nearly every customer says that they want to make sure their site looks the same no matter what browser the end user prefers.

That’s like saying I want every baby born to look the same in 2010. It hasn’t happened in 10,000 years and somehow I don’t think it ever WILL happen, even with all the genetic engineering available today. CSS/Web2.0 technology is advancing rapidly, opening doors for new techniques and thrilling features a website can have, making rich-user friendly interfaces a reality. Unfortunately, the best browsers are the only ones able to take advantage of it, Google Chrome, FireFox, Safari.

So… strike one for Microsoft. They managed to put their browser on 9 out of 10 PC’s in the world and then refuse to advance with the rest of the world. Off I go to spend hours making things ‘look the same’!

However, there are a few basic and simple ideas that go along with getting your website listed on the first page of a search engine directory such as google.com and Yahoo!. Read this article to understand a little of what goes into making yourself visible on the web and what TopSoft endeavors to make happen.

1. Location, Location, Location!
Location has always been the coveted among real estate and is the difference between mediocre living and high living. The internet is no different. In the early days of internet usage it was a phone number, a high-pitched handshake and BBB (bulletin boards) style communication and gaming. Now, with domain names, sub domain names, sub-sub domain names, location ( domain name ) is highly important.

Whole libraries could be filled with the number of domain names currently in use and reserved for use. This makes picking the right one for your company critically important! How many times have we looked at a website or email address that looks like: js.smith@jo-the-plumber-online.com. Worse, try through a radio commercial telling your audience what your website is! No one would ever make it to your website simply because most people wouldn’t type the right address and give up after 3-5 attempts. As river front property makes money in real estate, easy and appropriate domain names enhance the ease of which customers find you, increase the rating of modern search engines and makes promoting your site and handing out email addresses easy.

For instance, if I told you that our website was www.topsoftdesignstudio.com, it makes sense! The search engine matches topsoftdesignstudio much easier with semantic searches for design or studio, users can easily enter that in by hearing the phonics and without hypens or periods to detract from the spelling challenge, it’s no problem!

2. Get Exposed!
Owning a website domain name, hosting or even having a great website means nothing when you consider the fact that there are millions of websites online today. With giants like Yahoo!, FaceBook, MySpace and many others, your fighting for the attention span of a world that thrives on Starbucks and 30 minute fixes.

So how DO you get noticed? A part of search engine marketing is getting your name and site linked in as many other locations as possible. Most people don’t know that Search Engines rank your ‘friendliness’ by how many other sites refer to yours. Those referrals equal friends, and businesses that get a lot of referrals make money! This is relatively easy to do, it just takes hours of monotonously typing your company name, address, phone number, hours of operation, website, email address and primary business categories into dozens of FREE online directories like Google business center, Yahoo! Business link, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN accounts are also taking hold to produce more exposure without monetary costs.

3. Content is King! She who writes the copy controls the world!
No really, search engines are three-year olds that put the square block into the square hole. If it were so easy I wouldn’t have a job. The amount of work that goes into making your site search engine friendly would boggle most people’s minds and make them feel a little better about paying for the service. However, when the website project is approached with a content first mentality, the design will flow around the copy and make this part easier.

There are grading algorithms used by search engine tools to grade your website by several factors. A) What reading / comprehension level is required to read your website. (I’m not kidding…) B) How does the content match up with domain name and listing categories, C) How many images vs. plain text on your page. SEO used indexing words to make the most use of search engines.

We revere the King, President or Emperor above all things. Likewise, the content of our websites must match what we are selling or offering to the general public, otherwise we lose attention spans and potential clients.

4. Be Specific! Remove the ‘um’ from your online speech!
Your site content has to be relevant! If anyone searches for a particular product or service and clicks through to your website you have achieved 50% success. If your landing page content doesn’t match what was being searched for, the most important 50% was lost! What people search for MUST be directed to pages that match the content!

If you’ve ever google’d for a manual or recipe or something you really wanted to know and clicked the first result in the list and spent 5 minutes clicking through the sites pages looking for the answer to your question and then finally gave up, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Poorly designed sites that don’t have specific page content on every pages description meta tags and content destroy the possibility of quick conversions.

5. Think Long-Term: If you build it, they will not come
‘My websites not working.’ – ‘You can’t even find my website by searching for its domain name!’ – ‘I’m not paying for a website when I can’t even get a couple hits on my free website!’

We’ve probably all heard and/or said these. The bottom line is, websites and marketing are like a good diet. Not a pill or miracle hormone, but a diet. It’s a lifestyle not a quick fix. Often times people will post up a quickie website and look the next day to see how many people looked at it! They get excited because the web stats show 14 page visits! The next day? Nothing. That’s because the 14 visits was you refreshing the page to see your creation!

This thing of the internet takes time. Search Engines first have to be told you exist and then they have to fit you into the job queue to come check out. From there it depends on your ‘grade’ how you get noticed. The most important factor is to ADVERTISE your website! I know…. You paid for the website so you did advertise it! Right. That’s like saying when you have flyers printed that they should hand themselves out!

Search engines actually grade you on current hits! Yea, I know that sounds completely backwards, but it’s true! If your site hasn’t been looked at in a few months and the content of the pages hasn’t changed in a few years, you start getting ignored. Just like that ad in the yellow pages, that is yellow with a black border on it and words that mumble something non-descript.

If you build it, they will NOT come. If you tell them that it is there to be looked upon, they will come look upon it! Use online resources to advertise your website. The irony of the whole thing is that there is an ethereal tipping point where once you reach a certain level of traffic, the momentum keeps itself. FaceBook didn’t bloom overnight, it tooks years of advertising. Getting 10 people using it and they told 10 more…

So concludes my top-five hot points to using the web in your favor. After the dot-com boom, the world of websites has settled down into a mildly competitive place where a few make it big and many more sit out there doing something. Every project has to start with a clear objective. Every new business that succeeds has to use some form of business plan or model to build. A website isn’t a weekend project but months and often years of practice, trial, error and renewed vigor to make it big!