Mark Gorman

Duvel 101

Mark — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:58:58 +0000

Being the Belgian Beer fan I am, I found this quite amusing on the back of the Duvel Bottle … “or good looking strangers . What is amazing is the 100′s of Duvels I have enjoyed in my life I have never noticed this fun little saying on the back of a 325ml bottle. I will have to check the 750ml and 3L bottles in my wine cellar as well. Also, is this on the european version of the bottle, or just the US.

10 Website Mistakes Small Businesses Make

Mark — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:41:01 +0000

I read this article on freeenterprise.com and wanted to add some of my personal comments with things I have seen and experienced (artlical acquired from freeenterprise.com). You will see my comments in red after each point.

In this age of social media and digital everything, you can’t afford to be a website weakling. If your competition has a killer online presence, and you don’t, you lose. Today’s consumers look online more than ever before. Even business owners who think they don’t really need a “best in class” website are missing more than they think.

Here are 10 common mistakes that small businesses make with their websites, and how to fix them:

1. Crummy Content: Thanks to the rise of social media and changes in how search engines operate, it’s now more important than ever to have high-quality content on your site. Off-topic and poorly written content won’t show up in search and makes your site look second-rate. Don’t load up on sales pitches. Instead, provide helpful tips, case studies and other info that gives customers and prospects valuable information on how to solve a problem or accomplish a task. Avoid industry jargon and keep it conversational. A service such as HubSpot.com can help. Crummy content is something that is seen a lot, make sure it is something people want to read, or are searching for.

2. Keyword Clueless: Knowing — and using — the proper keywords for the products and services your business sells is important to online success. Even if you think you know what they are, unless you’ve used a keyword discovery tool to see the precise terms that real people are typing into search engines daily, you haven’t done it right. KeywordDiscovery.com and the keyword tool in Google AdWords can help. When was this article written 2005? Keywords are old folks, proper title titles, page design, and other items are what is in. Wow ….

3. Social Scarcity: No website is complete today without some nod to social media. At a bare minimum that should be a link to your Facebook page, but could and should also include Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and your own blog. Okay … I will go along with this one, a good social media plan can’t hurt.

4. Missing Measurement: Who’s visiting your website? Where are they coming from? What are they doing once they get there? What are the most and least popular portions of your site? What kinds of visitors are making you the most money? If you lack the answers, you’re flying blind. Sign up for a web metrics service such as Google Analytics to get a grip on what’s happening. Excellent point, this is why I supply with to all my clients.

5. Obvious Omissions: It’s stunning how many websites lack obvious info such as contact information, hours and location, or seemingly try to hide it. Don’t make people hunt for a “Contact Us” page. Display your preferred means of contact prominently across your site. If you make it easy for people to call or email, they will. Be sure you have a process in place to follow up all inquiries. Not only do you need this, it needs to be easy to find. Mobile optimized sites help with this a lot.

6. Offer-less Ordering: If you want people to sign up, order or otherwise engage, you need to encourage it with some type of offer or call to action. You could, for example, offer free trials, discounts or a newsletter. Tell people what you want them to do. I have a few clients do this and it does help. 10% off your next purchase if you sign up for our e-newsletter. Not to bad a deal

7. Dorky Design: Design counts. But it’s not all about looking pretty. It’s about creating a great user experience and being highly functional and effective at attracting, keeping and converting customers. Obvious cookie-cutter sites and over-the-top images undercut your goals. Customers are there because they want to accomplish something, and your design needs to reflect that. Keep all order and lead-generation forms simple. The more information you require, the fewer people you’ll get filling them out. I like to relate to meeting a guy or girl. First impressions are important and this is your chance to make one heck of a first impression. Don’t be that dorky person who is badly dressed, that one wants to talk to. Let people say … who, nice shirt … or better yet. Awesome website, who did it.

8. Laughably Link-less: If people can’t find you online, you’re toast. One thing that makes Google (and other search engines) take notice is how many quality sites link to yours. Other sites are more likely to link to yours if you offer helpful information such as tips, white papers, newsletters, a blog or other items. Sending out regular press releases on your business is one way to build links. You can also seek links from professional associations, clients and vendors. BE CAREFUL … hire a professional seo company. I may know a few, and it is not me. Know what you do, and do it well

9. Unborn Updates: Incorrect or outdated info on your website spells certain doom. If your latest press release is three years old or other content is clearly aging, customers will wonder how up-to-date and vibrant your business really is. Review and update all content on your site regularly to keep it fresh and timely. Why come back to your website if your dinner menu is from the fall of 2012. Stay up to date,inform your visitors of what is happening. This is simple on a platform such as wordpress.

10. Porky Pages: Cluttered, slow-loading pages that give users headaches just looking at them are the bane of many a small biz website. Avoid garish colors, multiple type fonts and large image files that slow things down. This won’t happen if you use a professional …

This article appears courtesy of SCORE, Mentors to America’s Small Business. Get free advice from more than 12,000 volunteer business mentors in over 340 chapters across the nation atwww.score.org. Daniel Kehrer is Founder of BizBest (www.bizbest.com), an independent information service for small business and startups. © 2012 BizBest Media

Buccella Launches New E-commerce Website

admin — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:48:11 +0000

Excited to annonce that Buccella Vineyards has launched their new website just intime for it’s 2010 release. The website is built on a WordPress platform and uses Nexternal’s Ecommerce platform to handle sales. Designed similar in fashion to their old site, the new site is easier for the client to update, manage seo and Nexternal makes the backend easier for the shopper being SEO friendly, and their awesome onscreen cart. To save you the time as I ramble on here, just go check out their site. It will be a lot easier. Cheers !!!

How To Create Mobile Site Click-to-Call Tracking In Google Analytics

admin — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:57:17 +0000

Today, Intrapromote is going to help you create a custom report in Google Analytics (GA) to track click-to-call links on your mobile site’s pages. There are two ways to do this in GA - Event Tracking or Virtual Pageviews. We recommend going with the Event Tracking method since Virtual Pageviews will add to the total pageview count.

Using Intrapromote’s mobile site as today’s example, here’s how to setup Event Tracking. This is also a service that is offered by us as well.

SEO For Fine Dining

Mark — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 18:26:12 +0000

Web design and SEO for fine dining

Preferred SEO company of choice, Intrapromote was approached by a luxury hotel client regarding the standalone site for one of their on-site restaurants. At the time the site was built, no care was given to SEO for the site. Additionally, the site was also not entirely userfriendly, meaning that while it was nearly undiscoverable by search engines, the site also experienced a high bounce rate. Prior to optimization and updates to make the site more user-friendly, traffic generated by organic search was less than half that afterward.

Recommendations

Intrapromote created a strategy designed to optimize the site using relevant keywords, as the site was previously relying only on traffic generated by its brand name. Additionally, Intrapromote’s strategy included structural changes to promote better userfriendliness, as the site had previously taken three clicks from the homepage to get to information users typically search for when visiting a restaurant site, such as menus and contact information.

Intrapromote made recommendations to several areas of the site, including:

Homepage consolidation through 301 redirects
Title elements
Meta data
Design changes for increased amount of text content
Addition of informative, keyword-rich navigation

View the full case study & results here ( Download PDF )

Sunset Magazine’s Western Wine Awards

admin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:24:30 +0000

Sunset Magazine’s Western Wine Awards focus solely on the best wine producers in the west, and are recognized as one of the biggest honors for western winemakers. The 2011 winners were announced in the most recent issue of Sunset Magazine, and Anomaly Vineyards (a client I may add, although we have nothing to do with the wine making) was honored to have their 2008 vintage selected as the winner in the “Deep Pockets” (all reds $61 and over) category.

Be sure to check out their site and wine at www.anomalyvineyards.com

Client Feeback

admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:03:33 +0000

Stay tuned as we gather up some client feedback ….

Also, feel free to check out my Linkedin page for more references.

Colbrook Kitchen

Mark — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:05:01 +0000

I would like to take the time to welcome Colbrook Kitchen to our new list of clients for 2011. Colbrook kitchen provides “cool tools” for cooks along with in-depth reviews, recipes and “cool tips”.

Piper and Kennedy are the cooks in Colbrook Kitchen. Both lawyers and former high-tech executives, and have been married for over 25 years, but their passion always has been cooking and entertaining.

Constantly looking for ways to do things better in the home kitchen, without sacrificing the quality of the results. They’ve traveled the world and, unlike many travelers, always make it a point to checkout the local cookware stores. And we love cooking tools that combine great design and outstanding functionality. We’ve bought and either loved or discarded more cook’s tools than you can imagine — we’ve done all this investigation and experimentation so that you don’t have to. We hope you agree.

They started this business to discover and bring to you what we think are the best tools for your kitchen. We will identify and recommend tools that enable the home chef to do even the simplest tasks easier and well. Along the way, we will share recipes using the tools we recommend. We will sell only the products that we personally use and recommend. We believe that each product that we sell is well designed, solves a problem, functions well, and is worth both the money and the space in your kitchen. Our motto is: if we don’t use it, then we won’t sell it!

Come share their enthusiasm for cooking and for the ‘Cool Tools’ they recommend for you. Tell us about your favorite tools, the tools you want, or want to replace, and they’ll try to help. Visit Cookbrook Kitchen.com

Stimulent Announces New Partnership

admin — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:45:34 +0000

Stimulent announces a new strategic partnership with Search Engine Optimization experts Intrapromote and Lead to Conversion. Being a company that believes in “do one thing and do it right” we feel this is the perfect fit for Stimulent. Our offerings for web, video and other online projects only go so far. Many of our clients ask about SEO, Google Local and more. Although we know the basics about these technologies we are not experts, nor claim to be.

While there are literally hundreds of thousands of web companies, SEO companies, experts, gurus, ninjas, etc. that are offering SEO. We do not want to become one of those “other guys”. We want to do what we do best.

One the other hand, we feel we have chosen one the best SEO companies in the country to handle your business needs, not to mention they are right around the corner from my favorite pizza shop.

Be sure to check out the offerings from Intrapromote and Lead to Conversion.

Integrated Search Marketing - Just as holistic branding examines and refines everything that makes up your entire brand, integrated search marketing considers all search marketing component parts and organizes them into a joint effect that is greater than the “sum of the parts acting alone”.
Organic Search Engine Optimization - 38 million people use search engines daily and 75-90% of Internet users begin their quest for information at search engines. When competing online for targeted site visitors, it is important to use a time-tested, reliable Best Practices approach to achieve higher search engine rankings and increased conversions.
Link Building Campaigns - Increasing the number of quality, incoming links to your site has become a very important part of the Search Engine Marketing process.
Social Media Marketing - Social media Web site traffic and user interaction is growing by leaps and bounds each month and presents a wonderful opportunity for companies seeking to expand their online exposure and brand awareness capabilities.
Local SEO – Every day, millions of people search the internet to find local businesses offering the products and services they need. With an optimized Google Places and Local Directories campaign, you can make sure that your business turns up in relevant searches.

On these programs you can work through us or deal with Intrapromote and Lead to Conversion directly and eliminate “the middle man”. Just let them know Mark sent you.

Andesite Vineyards

Mark — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:44:48 +0000

Andesite Vineyards Wines

Stimulent would like to take the time to welcome Charles and the staff at Andesite Vineyards to our beloved list of Client. This small batch Spring Mountain Vineyard saw the need for a new site and had seen our work with a couple of his neighbors, and it was a match. I even had a chance to sample some of their wine while out in the valley. Great stuff.

Although we will not be touching their online sales system we will be redoing the website, adding members online section and implementing some social media. All good stuff and we’ll let you know when the new site up.