Fresh Content Attracts

Oh, those algorithms – they keep on changing. Not only does your site have to look great for Google Preview but now you could become invisible because of static content. Regular updating encourages search engine spiders to visit more often. If your website is just sitting on the web with last year’s news you can do some things to tell the search engines that you are a FRESH resource for information. At the same time your customer visits will increase because you’re an interesting place to visit:

• Blogs are considered news. If you don’t have a blog it’s a great place to put interesting, current  articles and news that don’t fit perfectly in your website pages. Use it as your PR vehicle – you’ll be surprised who may discover your story.
• Projects or Inventory Updates. Keep those images and descriptions for your product FRESH and the search engines will come back more often.
• Sharable and Linkable Content. Keep adding original quality content to your websites (no scraping, please) and you will see your visits rise with your pages. You’ll be rewarded with bookmarking and linking on social media (“Likes” anyone?).  You can build authority on your site and visitor confidence will increase. Add testimonials if appropriate.(Note: You’ll be building your keywords base but make sure your content is written naturally for humans, not robots.)
• Events. If you have Specials, sales, events or calendars – that’s a good thing. It encourages your visitors to return for FRESH news and/or savings and keeps your business in the spotlight. Make sure you do not have expired information online so make notes on your calendar to pull off outdated information.  Alt-tag those eye-catching graphics you’ve added to go with them. (Tip: Google has a new “Highlighter” in Webmasters now to highlight your events so they’re easier to read in search. Try it.)

So if your website has just been sitting static with nothing new to say for a long time it’s time for a FRESH makeover and a content workout. The benefits:  higher rankings and more visitors  ~ how do you like them apples!

Robinson Advertising serving Maryland, DC, & Virginia,  designs and manages content for websites so you’re not left with an empty website that can’t be found.  Contact us today for help with yours!

The post Fresh Content Gives You A Search Advantage appeared first on Robinson Advertising.

Color Casts

Color casts.  Adjust with your color sliders (Image>Adjustments>Color Balance) until dominant overall colors tone down and your neutrals don’t lean towards one color or another.

Color Range

Color range. Again use your Color Range sliders to bring out the full spectrum. The eyes love color. Add additional color using the brush tool where needed to improve. Spike the color with the Vibrance (Image>Adjustments>Vibrance) tool.

Sharpen & Brighten

Sharpen it. Don’t assume because a graphic is simple that it’s acceptable. Fine detail in text and objects can use the Smart Sharpen tool (Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen). Watch the window and make certain that areas aren’t getting blotchy. Also, use your levels or curves to brighten your whites. Cloudy day? Select your subject, jump it to another layer (command/shift/J on Mac) and add a background layer in the perfect blue sky color of your choice.

Straighen, Dodge & Burn

Straighten, Dodge, Burn. If your images are distorted (I see this in remodeling images all the time- nobody wants a crooked house), correct the parallels. Select the image, Transform (command/shift/T on Mac), choose Distort, hold your shift key down and pull on bottom frame handles left and right until your verticals are straight. You may have to even straighten out the horizontals. Just hover around the selected image and rotate the image until you’ve got a straight horizontal line through your subject (you can pull rules from top and bottom rulers if you have trouble judging). This image also had dark areas that benefited from the dodge tool. A little sharpening with Smart Sharpen and then hand sharpening the details also helped bring out the shells. Also removed casts and adjusted the levels on this and warmed with a Photo Filter (Adjustments>Photo Filter).

Vibrance

Vibrance.  (Image>Adjustments>Vibrance). Some images can use all the above and a little extra. To make images pop with color use the vibrance adjustment. It makes landscapes glow, flowers pop, and dull shots become extraordinary. All the above steps were also used on this photo.

So put your best foot forward, aim for perfection, and fix those photos! There are probably “unusable” images in your portfolio right now that can become standouts that sell your customer – they just need a little tweaking! Don’t settle for ordinary.

The post Improve Your Images with Retouching appeared first on Robinson Advertising.

A Professional Business Page for Facebook

If you have your business on Facebook you’re probably looking to make new “friends”. You can search on Facebook for your business just like in traditional search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

What will Facebook searchers view when they reach your page? Will they be met with a grey blank page or cut-off logos, or blurry images that say “Unprofessional” or a colorful Welcome with your unique brand?

Robinson Advertising will design a fabulous look for your Facebook page:

• Page for Non-Fans with “Like Us” hint at top
• Page for Fans
• Designs Profile Pic banner
• Images to populate your small pics at top
• If you have a Blog, we can feed it into your page to populate it automatically

If you’d like a makeover for your Fan Page,  contact us, and present your business in a stylish light!

• See Robinson Advertising’s Facebook page now
• Metropolitan Bath and Tile
• Ayoub N&H Carpet & Rugs
• Brothers Sew & Vac
• Potomac Garden Center
• Welcome Home Washington
• Colonial Remodeling 

  …(don’t forget to “Like” our pages while you’re there! 

The post Cool Facebook Pages for Business appeared first on Robinson Advertising.

Ok, so we needed some marketing levity.  This is an actual sign up at a busy intersection (note: the phone number is blurred to protect the identity of the “remodeler”).

This is what this type of advertising says about this “business”:

• Most likely unlicensed, uninsured, uncertified
• Doesn’t care about quality for himself, why would he provide quality materials for your job
• At the point where he’s working out of the back of his truck if this is the level of his advertising and will probably disappear with your deposit

———————————————————————————————————-

Tricky Offer

Don’t Insult Your Customer’s Intelligence. You will lose them at “hello”.
Most adults can add: $250 towards $1250 credit = $1000.
(Already tricky, what will happen when they do the job?)

Also, how much will you be paying for the minimum windows and doors? Are they marked up $1000? True value is not represented in this ad and the average reader knows it. Wasted advertising dollars.

So as I find really scary, tricky, or just plain bad marketing and advertising I will post. You are welcome to add to the collection but please obscure the identity of the culprit (free link to your website!). 

And, advertise well out there, folks. You never know who will notice.

The post Bad Ads appeared first on Robinson Advertising.

Is your website exciting enough for Preview?

Do you see those little arrows on Google search pages and ads? That’s Google Preview. It’s a handy feature that allows you to see where you’re going before you get there. When a user clicks the arrows next to an organic web search or Adwords Ad they get a little popup of the landing page. This is a big deal if you have a less than presentable website.

It used to be PPC marketing and landing page optimization were separated by the blind click. Before, you had to judge by a few lines of text and/or the position of the search or ad – hardly a way to appraise if you were going to have a good experience in return for the click.

That structure let a lot of websites and advertisers get away with poor post-click marketing experiences. As long as the text was tempting enough, the unwitting visitor would click – and yes, some hapless portion of them would read on and  stay, but no more. Bad websites and landing pages are now there for all to see.

Now, upon entering this “preview mode,” a user can hover over any ad — or organic listing — on the search results page (SERP) to see what that landing page looks like. They can read snippets of text from the actual page to see how closely it relates to the text of the ad. And by navigating their mouse around the SERP, they can quickly compare all of the different websites before they pick and click.

Test Your Own Preview

Google Instant Preview for websites and Ads should encourage you to test your own website. Type a search term that will bring up you and your competitors on a page. Now start to hover over the magnifying glasses. Which would you pick to visit?

Now, hover your mouse over arrows and take a close look at your own website:

• How does your design look in that popup rectangle?
• Is it clogged with clashing junk from years of ill-thoughtout additions?
• Is is a long, dull form?
• Are there too many graphics? Too little?

AdWords: This move by Google now makes the click-through rate (CTR) metric relevant to landing pages. As people become aware of this feature, previews of good landing pages will receive more clicks than undesirables.

The more people get used to this feature the more they will use it. Will your website or ad be the one that’s clicked?

Good user experience on the web is what we all want. After all, we’re all searchers at one time or another.

The post Does your website shine under Google Preview? appeared first on Robinson Advertising.

The Affluent Reader

Remember in the dark ages when your advertising budget included newspaper, magazine and direct mail? Wondering if you’re missing something now? The affluent customer (the one you want?) reads print…

The post Print Media Reaches the Customer Who Spends Money appeared first on Robinson Advertising.

“Someone” may have set it up years ago, you may have moved, changed phone numbers, added services…anyway it’s wrong and you don’t know how to make revisions or it’s missing all together and you don’t know how to add it.

First things first: Do you have a Google Account? Open a browser, If not create one…

Then sign in at the top right corner of a Google search page

Scenario #1: You don’t have a  listing at all.

• To add your business listing,  sign in and go to Google Places.
• If you’re brand new, click on “Claim your business listing on Google – for free” or if you already have a Places Page set up your dashboard will show all of the listings you have added.
• This brings you to a page where you can add and edit information about your business, like address, photos, videos, custom attributes, and more! Your changes should appear almost instantly.

Scenario #2: You don’t know who originally set up your business, you’re the owner and need to change the information and get it in your own Places Page for good.

• First, let’s find your listing. Go to a blank Google search page.
• Do a search for your company.
• If you have a Place page you will see a blue link to the right, click “Place page”
• When you come to the “Place page” look in the top right corner for “Edit this place – Business owner”
• Click on “Business owner”.
•  This will take you to the next page where you will select  “Edit my business listing”.

Make all the changes you need on the resulting Places page for your business. Google will verify you’re the owner by either sending you a postcard to the business address or making an instant phone call to your place of business’ phone in the listing. Either way you will get a PIN that you’ll enter to verify the listing. When you get the PIN either enter it right away if you’re sitting next to your phone, or if you’re waiting for the postcard (comes in a week or two) there will be a box to fill in next to your business name in your Places Page listing.

If in the future you need to edit again, just go back to your Places page and select Edit.  Good luck with your listing. It’s another great place to get “found” on the internet.

The post How to Edit or Add Your Google Places Page appeared first on Robinson Advertising.

Interactive Ads with Quick Response Codes (Tags)

Microsoft Tag

A QR (Quick Response) Tag is a high-capacity color barcode (HCCB) with encoded information. You can give your mobile audience an expanded experience with QR Codes (or Tags) on just about anything: postcards, ads, posters, websites, buildings, signage, trucks, packaging, business cards…

Create specific Tags by using the tag creators web service. (For example: we’re using the Microsoft Tag Reader – to create tags using Tag Manager (you must sign in using a Windows LiveID) Go to: tag.microsoft.com. The Tag Manager website, where you can create Tags, and which provides detailed reporting and analytics capabilities that let you monitor and improve the effectiveness of your Microsoft Tag campaigns. You can change the content of your tag any time!

• You must have a tag reader’s application installed on a mobile device, This works on Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android-based Internet-capable mobile phones that have cameras.
• Open your app and hold within a frame on your mobile device and it will be scanned into the reader – and voila! there is the reward!
• Although Tags are easy to create, how Tags are used determine their effectiveness in communicating the encoded information to the audience.
• There are 4 basic Tag types: URL, free text, vCard, and dialer
• Be sure to add directions for getting the mobile reader i.e.:  get the free mobile app at http://gettag.mobi

What do they look like? Here’s just some of the variety that tags and 2D codes come in:

What are some ways to use them?

• This fall Glamour Magazine’s Issue Will Include 2-D Bar Codes That Trigger Facebook ‘Likes’
• Link to videos that show 360 views (clothes, cars, furniture)
• Put a QR code on your business card that when scanned will add your information to their contact list or dial your number
• Link to a webpage on a postcard that tells your story in length, shows a portfolio or promotes your image
• Create a code on a sign outside your place of business that has an invitation to come inside and use an offer that customers walking by can bring inside and redeem immediately
• A code that brings you to a peak inside via images or video (I.e. a house for sale or office space for lease)
• A code on a trade show banner that takes the audience to your website
• Add it to packaging to make it interactive

Quick Tips:

Size: You must create and display the Tag and its surrounding white space exactly.
Black & White tags should be ⅞” x ⅞”. 5 Row Color Tags must be ¾” x ¾”. Custom tags minimum size must be 1.25″ square. This includes the white border space around the square.

If your code is in the distance (like a sign) the code should be 1″ for each 1 foot away the viewer must stand. Scanning on an angle may not work. Insufficient light or deep shadows across a large QR code can also cause a code to be unscannable.
Be responsible: Don’t tempt drivers to scan while operating a vehicle.

You must create and display the Tag and its surrounding white space exactly

Always TEST before implementing.

Bonus: The USPS is offering a 3% discount on mail sporting 2-D codes if mailed during July or August 2011. Mobile usage continues to grow so maybe it’s time for that direct mail piece and new video you’ve been thinking about.

Got a great idea for using QR code on your next ad or direct mail piece? Contact us today!

The post Quick Start Guide to QR Codes (Tags) appeared first on Robinson Advertising.