“Slow and steady wins the race.”

But, in today’s fast paced internet world – is that still the case?  Does slow and steady still win?

I would say yes.

Over the years we have helped many, many clients increase their sales via increasing their online impact or “empire.”  I want to share with you one such story.

Two years ago we created a website and started releasing coupons on that website every month or so.

We have seen an increase in traffic every month for those two years and now we are at a 6x increase in traffic from where we started.

How?

By just being consistent in delivering content to our users.

So, if you aren’t consistent and need help, contact Fonder Consulting.

Check it out.

Marketing in the Fourth Dimension

Don’t worry!  Here are a couple tools to help you out.

ColorZilla FireFox plugin

ColorZilla is a free FireFox plugin that will allow you to grab the color from any web page.  This is a great tool to help you match a base color to a graphic or to a web page that you like.

ColorZilla

Color Schemer Online

Color Schemer Online is a free tool that will take one color and create an entire palate of matching colors.  Also, it allows you to darken and lighten the color scheme with the click of a button.

Color Schemer Online

Here’s what I do.  I find a graphic or website that has a color I like.  Then, I use ColorZilla to grab the HEX value for that color (“AF235B” for example).  Finally, I pop onto Color Schemer and paste in the HEX value and click the “Set HEX” button.

And by magic – a nice set of colors for me to use is displayed.

This tutorial is a supplement to that training.

Have you ever thought that a graphic would really add some “pop” to your website, or thought that you wanted to create a graphical advertisement to link to a specific area on your websites.

Well, now you can do that with PowerPoint 2007.

Actually you can do this with almost any version of PowerPoint, but the location of the buttons and the screenshots would be different.

1. You need to change the “Page Setup” to match your desired image output size.  To do this, take the pixel width and height of your desired graphic and divide by 72.  So, if you want to create a standard “wide skyscraper” ad – which is 160 pixels by 600 pixels – you would make your PowerPoint page: 2.22 inches by 8.33 inches.
2. Now you can drop in any graphic or text that you need to create the ad.  Don’t forget to use the cool PowerPoint 2007 clip art files and formatting options.
3. Finally, do a “Save As” and select “Other Formats” – in the file type drop down box select the .jpg file type.  After you click “Save”; click “Current Slide Only.”

Here is an example.

Of course not.

That is where Ping.fm steps in.  Ping.fm is a tool that will connect all your social networking platforms together and allow you to post updates to all locations at the same time!

So, take a couple minutes and get a Ping.fm account.

For other ideas on how to leverage social networking tools, contact Fonder Consulting.

One seldom touched social marketing vertical is blog aggregators.

A blog aggregator is, at its core, a blog search engine; but instead of “spidering” for content it relies on blog writers to deliver content to it.

But, what most blog writers don’t realize is that you have to create an account and “claim” your blog in order to get good placement in searches.

So, if you have a blog then start creating and account and claiming your blog on these, top two aggregators: Technorati and Bloglines.

If you are leverage long-tail tools like blog aggregators then contact Fonder Consulting today.

If a portion of your online marketing plan doesn’t include video then you’re definitely missing the boat.  People love to watch video online that is why YouTube is it so popular.  But the major downside to having video on your website is that the spiders for search engines cannot listen to your video or watch your video and know what it’s about.  You have to have accompanying text. 

A simple and easy way to change the audio for your video into text to find a good speech to text tool.  There are many out there, but I recommend Dragon NaturallySpeaking. 

In fact, I didn’t type this blog post at all, I spoke it using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

In order to make the most out of your online videos consider giving a speech to text tool.

Another free video sharing website is Viddler.

Viddler has all the same basic features as YouTube, but it has one major improvement…

Viddler does not restrict your video, based on time, it restricts your video based on size.  Its current size restriction is 500 MB.  Why is this a big deal, because you can squeeze a long video into father megabytes.  If you increase the compression…

Now, now… I’m not saying switch all your videos to Viddler, I’m saying that it is a good alternative to YouTube if you have a long video to display.

By the way, I didn’t type any of this text.  I spoke it.  Stay tuned…

To research your potential customers and find out their thoughts and opinions on various topics in your vertical market.

To do that you had to hire an expensive market research firm – wait a couple months – then find out the results.

No longer, just use Twitter.

Because Twitter community where its users share their thoughts on any subject in real-time you can do a search and find out what people are saying on topics in your vertical.

Let’s say that I am selling mattresses.  I would go to Twitter and just type in “mattress” and have a window into the thoughts of consumers on the topic of mattresses.

Oh yeah, this is in real time.

So, take a minute, and look through the Twitter “window” and see what you see.

If you have done any research on search engines and how they work you know that a search engine relies on the copy or text on the web page to know what that page is about.

Google can’t listen or watch your video to know what the page is about.

Google can’t look at your images.

Maybe someday (optical character readers are getting better), but right now it is the copy or text on the page that search engines consume.

Because of this there is a phrase in online marketing – “Content is King.”  It is a spinoff of the old business adage – “Cash is King.”

But is content really king?  How can you be sure?

You can be sure the same way Woodward and Bernstein uncovered the Watergate scandal.

Follow the Money!

• YouTube – free video sharing – Sold for over $1.5 Billion
• Bebo – free photo and video sharing – Sold for $850 Million
• MySpace – free community – Sold for $580 Million
• How Stuff Works – free content – Sold for $250 Million
• Photo Bucket – free photo sharing – Sold for $250 Million

Enough said.  Create content and you too can be king in your marketplace, for your business, in your world.