Alex Designs Blog » marketing

Video has changed everything: design + marketing + future

alexdesigns — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:05:00 +0000

There were two challenges for me to start doing my own video. One, I have no time. So it is really tough to fit anything into my schedule, especially editing and learning new programs/formats. The second reason is I know I am terrible in front of the camera and a really bad presenter.

Now after 2 months of experimentation, video has really changed everything for me. For example, almost twice a week someone NEW mentions seeing one of my videos. These online relationships are now more valuable because we have a more personal connection.

Also, I am seeing design, movies and marketing concepts a lot differently. It’s a new perspective on how to make things more beautiful and precise. In ecommerce, it is providing more credibility for websites with low brand awareness and will directly improve conversion rates. Or at least shrinks the buying sales process for new customers. Video reviews are great use for this space. Plus, creating video assets are more valuable than photos, graphs or articles. Videos have more viral opportunity so the long tail is even longer.

With each new video I complete, I take a step towards pushing my creativity and improving my career. The quality of the videos will get better along with my verbal skills. In the meantime, below is my first HD movie I put online (personal test). You can preview it below, or visit Vimeo for the full HD version.

Are you doing video?

Let me know – I would love to share thoughts on editing, concepts or collaborations.

Owen In Florida from alex harris on Vimeo.

Automatically Improve Traffic from Social Networking Websites

alexdesigns — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:14:00 +0000

Are you getting (non paid) web traffic and leads from social networking websites? I am working on a comprehensive strategy to improve “Referring Social Network Traffic”. The business goals of using social sites include building brand exposure, creating customer relationships and bringing traffic back to the original website. This works the same for personal branding and corporate web marketing plans. Now you can automate the delivery of content to each of the social networking websites and stay consistently activate. This results in improving your “Referring Social Network Traffic”. The key is to make it really easy for customers to connect (friend) and find you on ALL of the social networks so the audience consistently increases. I think, all of your personal and/or business profiles need a consistent look and feel to ensure brand consistency.

Here are some things to think about:

Your website or blog needs to have a “Social Networking” section. This area should be very easy to find and include clickable icons with text links. You can also use Lijit and automate the icons that show up on your website, plus track those subscriptions.

Make sure your company or brand is easy to find in a search query on the popular social networking sites. This can be done by using target keyword phrases or tags in the personal profiles, business profiles and groups you create. Example: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and ect should all have a consistent about me section in the profile messaging that includes target keywords.

Companies need to move marketing dollars into video. This is especially important since YouTube is owned by Google. Video is an essential part of universal search. Naming and tagging your videos with keywords make them show up better in search results. Tip – Try TubeMogul and you can upload one video, then distribute it to ten sites at once, plus tag and track them all in once place.

Automate the content updates for ALL social networking sites. For example, with Twitter you can update your status on Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, SocialThing, FriendFeed and more. You can also automatically make your new YouTube videos show up on Facebook. Plus automate your blog posts, events, Flickr photos to show up on your profile(s). This makes the company look active and keeps your audience’s attention.

Connect with your audience with automated marketing research. For example, with TweetScan you can track keywords on Twitter and create RSS feeds out of that content. So, you can be notified automatically (web or sms) when someone talks about your brand or even a competitors. Also, Google and Yahoo alerts are extremely helpful to track blogs, news and ect.

Create viral content that is easily shareable. The biggest traffic drivers for me have been controversial articles that attract a lot of comments or people to Digg or Stumble.

A custom email signature is an easy way to express that you are using social sites. Having this on your personal or business emails will help increase your fans and friends.

[Addition] Widgets are great tools also, suggested by Justin Thorp. Widgets are a great way to deliver automated content, games and applications for a company or brand. Example: A health brand can create a widget for their audience to use on their desktop, Facebook, MySpace and personal start page or websites. Clicking links in widget and forwarding of applications will result in more traffic back to your site.

Who else is thinking about this?

Have you see other blog posts about the automation of content for social networking sites? Are you generating traffic from your social networking websites? Please post your ideas or feedback here.

I am testing this strategy across the web with corporate and personal websites to see which social networking sites bring the most traffic back to the original websites. Plus, I am experimenting with the best ways to get brand exposure, plus find ways to monitor the success in traffic, leads and conversions.

Web designers that improve revenue & long term growth

alexdesigns — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:03:00 +0000

There are a lot of great web designers, but many designers do not focus on making their clients more money. A comprehensive marketing plan along with a great website design is the easiest way to help a company grow. The first impression of the design is especially important for small to mid size businesses that do not have strong brand recognition or are just starting out. When putting together a professional and organized web design it is important to build confidence with your visitors, show that you are a credible company and create a user experience is easy to read and encourages the visitors to tell their friends about the site.

Most designers do not understand all the factors that contribute to the success of a website. The artwork is just a small portion of what is needed to be successful. When considering a layout you also need to consider monitor resolutions, SEO, streamlining customer service needs, reducing page fallout and cart abandonment, plus determing a strategy to create a long term relationship with your visitors.

Exposing my secrets for successful website designs!

After 8 years of focusing on conversion rate web design, I have developed a strategy of best practices that goes into every one of my website designs. My company focuses on helping companies improve their revenue online through web design, internet marketing and building web traffic for long term growth. My new video podcast will present different ways my company helps websites improve their conversion rates, collect more leads and have successful growth. Some of the topics will include: Creating Landing Pages, Improving Conversion Rate, Defining Persona’s / Click Paths, Best practices of a Website Re-Design, Designing for SEO, Follow-On Marketing, Multi-store eCommerce and Improving the lifetime value of your customers. You can sign up for the podcast on iTunes be clicking here.

Here is a sample of what is coming

Take a look at the first video podcast below. This video is a quick overview of me and some of the topics that I will be talking about. If there are subjects that you would like me to cover on my blog or in my podcast, please comment here, email me suggestions or you can call the podcast comment line at 206-888-0328 and I may play it back during the show.

Move Web Pages Without Losing SEO Ranking

alexdesigns — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:53:00 +0000

For the last few weeks, I have been trying to transfer some search engine keyword rankings from my old blog to a new niche blog I created for Landing Pages. Take a look at these Google results here. As displayed in the graphic, Alex Designs is listed with two results for that keyword. Obviously, it would be stupid to screw this up.

My Approach

I created a blog post on the new web site that targets the keywords Landing Page Design and moved over the original content. Then all the previous links to this old post were changed to the new URL. Plus I added a server side 301 redirect to the old page. This strategy should transfer over the Google Ranking, plus the web traffic for my new blog.

There are several more pages like this that I need to complete. First, I am testing this page transfer, because it has the least traffic for this batch of keywords. If this is successful, I will then start to move over my remaining pages, one by one to build a new web presence for my new blog.

It’s time consuming, but this is my way of moving web pages without losing SEO Ranking. What do you think?

TV Advertising needs a viral long tail to gain ROI

alexdesigns — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:50:00 +0000

On Sunday, prior to watching the Superbowl I was curious if there will be buzz about the TV Commercials in the twitterverse and much to my suprise, there was a Twitterbowl. I randomly found out about the event because I track the word “diet” and my SMS exploded with alerts about the Diet Pepsi ad.

My question before the game was:

“Which super bowl commercial will provide the biggest lift in revenue and provide the long tail word of mouth exposure”

Here is what I remember

1) The brands that I remember are: Bud, Diet Pepsi, Coke, Career Builder and IronMan
2) The website URLs that I remembered are: none, but I did remember GoDaddy asking me to visit their site. I also remember the Tide commercial, it made me laugh and it made me want to visit the site.
3) The ads that were most talked about during the game: From what I saw, the Justin Timberlake commercial for Diet Pepsi had the biggest buzz.

That leads me to determine which commercial would gain actual revenue from these ads. My opinion, the biggest winner will be “IronMan”, the movie. The film looks great and now all of America wants to see it. You can’t buy that exposure anywhere. Every boy and their father be in theaters for this.

My winner was Tide – because of the viral website.

If you visit the site, My Talking Stain, they have an excellent viral execution using multimedia. Its simple, its funny and it makes you want to enter your information. They do a great job of collecting leads, why? To send you coupons to buy Tide. Overall, it’s the most diverse way to get brand exposure and the viral effect of their “Get Famous – Film A Spoof” will last a while. Here is the spoof I created:

In conclusion, I wasn’t really impressed with a lot of the commercials. Especially CareerBuilder, it was terrible. But, maybe they wanted to do that on purpose to cut through the clutter. Sales Genie too, did they purposely make the worst ads. I would never go to the site on purpose because they were so bad. There were a few other funny ones, like the AMP and Shaq. I don’t even remember the brand that Shaq was a jockey in.

The winners for me are the brands that establish the relationship of the product to the attractiveness of the commercial. Then in collaboration with a great website it a full experience that I will remember. Next time I am in the grocery store I may pick up Tide to clean my dirty shirt. Now the creative concept can really expand using online media/ads, blogs, YouTube and everything else to reach audiences for weeks and even months to come. The viral creative concepts build the long tail brand exposure and produce the best return on investment.