A few blog posts ago, we began writing about ways in which a business owner can not only up their game but how they can also gain more valuable custom references for their business. If you remember, references and testimonials are the key to increasing online marking and increasing business.

Let's first review the tips we discussed in our prior blog posts:

1. Ask More Specific Questions. Asking more leading questions will help to generate answers that are more detailed which will be easier for you to pull quotes from. Detail oriented answers will provide quotes that highlight what makes you stand out from competitors and/or the benefits of choosing you.

2. Video Testimonials. Video testimonials are far more influential than typical written testimonials and quotes. Get your customers to answer simple questions about your business on video by offering them some sort of incentive. You can even encourage customers to take some time to create and post their own video testimonials by also providing some sort of reward or incentive. Feel free to use the videos on your website, Facebook, or any other site you believe to be beneficial to you.

3. Understanding Your Customers. Learn how to maintain your standards or improve your business by getting to know more about what your customers like or don't like about your business. By formulating a list of valuable questions and turning them into a survey, you have a great opportunity to really get to know your customers. Promote your survey at your business or online and get your customers to take the survey by offering an incentive. Use the data to pull out key insights to use on your website, for other marketing materials, and to help you improve your business!

Our Newest Tip for Online Marketing:

1. Empowering Your Customers. Social media is one of your most powerful tools as a business owner. With the help of sites like Facebook, business owners have the ability to empower customers to promote your business like never before. For example, if you were to add the Facebook "Like" button to your business website and someone clicks that "Like" button, your business page/product will be posted to their newsfeed where all of their friends can see.

   In addition, you can use sites like Facebook or Yelp to offer "Check In" incentives. So every time a customer "Checks In" to your business location, a small incentive like a discount could be offered. Each time a customer "Checks In", it also show up on their news feed for all of their friends to see.

   Use social media to promote your rewards and perhaps consider a way to promote it at your physical location.

For more information on how you can improve your online marketing to customers, either stay tuned for our next blog posting or get in touch with us today at 1-951-541-9304 to speak with a marketing consultant about SEO management and PPC management for customer marketing.

Over the years, blogging has grown to become an intensely powerful tool. Through blogging, both large and small businesses alike have the ability to easily reach out to their customers or target audience. By utilizing your blog as a powerful marketing tool, you have the potential to greatly increase the amount of traffic your site receives. This can help you to develop stronger leads, contacts and clients, while establishing a sense of rapport and community with the readers - your potential customers.

One of the biggest and most important reasons why blogging is a great tool is the fact that the content is always changing. On top of the fact that it's keeping your customers/audience regularly updated, the new content is actually helping your blog to be continually recognized by search engines. Here's the reason why: for search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc... it's all about maintaining a dynamic site therefore content is King. By providing fresh content on a regular basis, you have the potential to be found on search engines for a variety of search terms/keywords.

Here are a few simple tips to get the most out of your blog:

1. It's better to update regularly with only a small amount of content, than to update it with larger blocks of content every so often. Just two or three small paragraphs can be enough to make an impact.

2. Maintain an overall theme to your blog. For example, if you're blog is about real estate and that's what you want to be known for, stick to writing about real estate trends, the real estate market, current real estate listings, real estate tips, real estate agents, etc... Don't randomly blog about an entirely different subject matter. The more relevant your blog is as a whole, the more powerful it becomes.

3. When you are getting ready to write your next post, strive to keep the subject matter of the particular post on point. For example, if you're going to be writing about a specific product, make the post all about it and only it. It is also important to utilize specific key phrases/words that are relevant to the particular subject matter or product.

Let's see an example of these tips in action:

One of our clients, who is a Close to My Heart Consultant, maintains her own personal scrapbooking blog: My Passion for Scrapbooking. Let's use her blog to point out all of the three tips listed above and how they have helped her stand out in a crowd on Google.

1. Our client makes it a point to post to her blog on a regular basis. For a great example, check out a complete list of her blog posts here. If you took a look at that list, you'll find that as of today, the 19th of August, she has already posted 11 blogs; in the month of July, she was able to post 16 blogs. It isn't necessary to write a post every day, but it is a great idea to try and write at least a few a week.

2. The name of her blog says it all: My Passion for Scrapbooking. As you can tell, her blog is all about anything and everything related to scrapbooking tips and projects as well as Close to My Heart products.

3. For our third tip in action, let's use one of blog posts titled: Where to Buy the Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge? If you take a look at this post, you'll find that the entire post is relevant to the subject of her title; she focuses specifically on how and where you can buy the product in question. Secondly, if you notice in the title of her post, she is focusing on a product called the Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge. You'll notice that throughout her post, she utilizes "Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge" as her key phrase/word. Keep in mind, this is just one of multiple blog posts she has written that refer to the Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge.

The results:

Through regular blogging and maintaining a consistent subject focus, our client has been able to achieve page ONE results on Google! Not just one result, but three! As I mentioned, the Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge is a common theme in some of her blog posts, so if you notice in the screen shot below, each of the three results reflect a different blog post (each of which refer to the Art Philosophy Cricut Cartridge). One of the results happens to be the blog post mentioned above.

With results like these, our client has the potential to reach a massive audience that she might not have been able to reach without the help of her blog.

So you see, using your blog for all that it can be has the potential to not only increase your page ranking on search engines, but to also make your site more appealing and visible to visitors searching for your product or subject matter.

For more information on how you can improve your online marketing to customers, either stay tuned for our next blog posting or get in touch with us today at 1-951-541-9304 to speak with a marketing consultant about SEO management and PPC management for customer marketing.

In our last blog we wrote about things that you can do, as a business owner, to not only up your game but to also help you gain more valuable custom references for your business. If you remember, references and testimonials are the key to increasing online marketing and increasing business.

Let's first review a couple of the tips we discussed in our last blog:

1. Ask More Specific Questions. Ask leading questions that will generate more specific answers for you to pull quotes from. More detail oriented help to provide you with quotes that will highlight what makes you stand out from other competitors and or what the benefits are of choosing you.

2. Video Testimonials. Video testimonials are even more powerful than standard written testimonials and quotes. Offer an incentive to get your customer to answer a simple question about your business on video or reward customers that take the time to create and post their own video testimonials. Use the videos on your website, Facebook, or any other site you think would be beneficial to you.

Our Newest Tip for Online Marketing:

1. Understand Your Customers. Have you ever wondered how many of your customers are repeat visitors or what their top reasons for choosing you are? This type of information can really help you to see how customers view your company, how you can improve or what you can keep doing that customers love. What's great, is the fact that it isn't as hard as you may think to gather this type of data from your customers.

   The first step is for you to think about what type of statistical information you consider to be the most valuable. From there you'll need to come up with specific questions that will help to generate the stats based on the answers provided. Example questions: "How often do you shop here?", "How did you find out about us?", "How is our service?", "How is our product selection?", etc... After you've created a list of questions to ask, create a survey.

   Then next step is getting your customers to actually take the survey. A great way to get customers to take your survey is by offering some sort of an incentive like a small discount. Be sure to include a link to your survey on your website and include information about your incentive. If you have a Facebook or Twitter account, make sure to promote it there as well. For in-store customers, consider uploading the survey to an iPad so you can have customers complete the survey at the point of sale for an instant discount.

   The final step is to gather and analyze all of the data together. Consider compiling the data every week, bi-weekly or monthly. Use the data to pull out key insights to use on your website, for other marketing materials, and to help you improve your business!

For more information on how you can improve your online marketing to customers, either stay tuned for our next blog posting or get in touch with us today at 1-951-541-9304 to speak with a marketing consultant about SEO management and PPC management for customer marketing.

When it comes to selecting a restaurant, doctor, trainer, local car dealership, etc..., most consumers have a tendency to look to others for recommendations and validation before choosing to commit to their purchase or choice. This is exactly why it is very important to include customer references and testimonials as a big part of your online marketing.

If you are asking what else you can do as a business owner to up your game, read up on these simple ways you can gain more valuable customer references for your business.

Improving Customer Marketing

1. Ask More Specific Questions. If you've ever asked a customer to provide a quote or testimonial for your business, it's likely that you've received ones that are very simple and general, like:

   "Friendly and great service - would definitely recommend!"

   Granted, a quote like this is better than nothing, however, it doesn't do much to provide a concrete reason for someone to choose you.

   When asking a customer to leave you feedback, consider asking more leading questions that will generate more specific quotes that highlight what makes you stand out from other competitors and what the benefits are of choosing you. For example, if you own a beauty salon whose competitive edge is offering later evening hours, consider asking one of your late-night customers something like "What is it about our late-evening hours that you like?" Or maybe if you are a personal trainer you could ask "How has our training sessions boosted your energy levels?"

2. Video Testimonials. While written testimonials and quotes are great as powerful marketing tools, video testimonials are even more powerful.

   If you run your business out of a location where customers can actually visit, think about asking your customers to answer a simple question about your business on video. As an incentive, you could offer your customer a small discount or perhaps a small free item. From there, you can post these videos on your website, Facebook, or any other site you can think would be beneficial to you.

   In addition, you could even reward customers with additional discounts or free gifts for taking the time to actually create and post their own video testimonials in which you require them to tag their video with specific terms related to your business. You could even create some sort of video contest where the winner receives some sort of grand prize.

For more information on how you can improve your online marketing to customers, either stay tuned for our next blog posting or get in touch with us today at 1-951-541-9304 to speak with a marketing consultant about SEO management and PPC management for customer marketing.

As a small business it's important to understand that, now more than ever, the best way to compete with your larger counterparts is by banding together with other small businesses. Together, small businesses can create a voice loud enough to compete with larger corporations. If businesses can harness the power of a collective and look to each other as partners and not competitors, they in turn have the ability to achieve great success.

So whether it is done formally or informally, take the time to build relationships with like-minded businesses and individuals. Here are just few great examples of how you can join forces with other small businesses.

1. Start by joining a local entrepreneur's meet up group. Local groups are a great way to share and receive advice, build support, and most importantly, gain referrals. Consider checking out MeetUp.com or your local chamber of commerce to find or even create a relevant group in your area.

   If you have a strong Twitter or Facebook following, don't be afraid to organize a meet up for a more powerful face-to-face networking experience. For strong referrals, consider a referral group like BNI where local professionals meet strictly to share referrals, marketing tips and even testimonials.

2. If in-person meetups aren't for you, or your business targets customers and clients on a far larger scale, try joining a social network or virtual group. You should be able to easily find like-minded entrepreneurs to exchange advice, gain support, build relationships and even partnerships. Sites to try out: Facebook, Twitter, and Entrepreneur Connect.

3. Help fellow small businesses. Networking is a two-way street. To be a successful networker, keep an eye out for any opportunity to assist a related small business. By providing valuable opportunities to others in your network, other businesses and individuals will be attracted to your network. Basically, if you give business to others, you'll gain business in return.

4. Create informal unions with other like-minded companies. Find a way to reach out to companies that share a similar customer service, business, product development, etc. Perhaps offer to post (to your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc...) about a business in exchange for them returning the favor. These kinds of alliances can greatly increase the value you provide to your own customers and even expand audience awareness of your business.

5. Let it be known that you support other small businesses. Take a look at some of the current vendors you are using to find out if there is room for you to "downsize" by supporting a local business (virtual or physical) instead. If you are encouraging other individuals and businesses to support small businesses, be sure that you're keeping true to your own words.

For more information on ways to boost, expand or network your business, contact us today. You can give us a call at 1-951-541-9304 or send us a message.

In this tutorial we're going to walk through how to resize images using Picnik. Picnik is a Free, web based photo editor that makes it easy to enhance your photos for web or print... For this tutorial we're going to set our parameters around an example size of: 300 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall.

How to Use the Picnik Resize Tool to Scale Photos & Images

1. The first step is to upload your photo by clicking the Upload button
2. Once the photo is loaded, click the Resize button. Next we'll enter the first dimension 300 - in the screen below you'll see that the editor automatically set the next dimension to 225 and if I attempt to change it to 200, the first dimension will change from 300 to 267 - this is because the checkbox Keep Proportions option is checked. Setting this option (which is default) ensures that the image is proportionally scaled down from the original size to keep the photo from looking distorted.
3. I unchecked the Keep Proportions option which now allows me to set the dimensions the way I want as shown in the screen below. Now if your photo looks unpleasantly distorted, it's because the dimension is too far from the proportional dimensions of the original photo. This is really common when using a photo that is vertical and the dimension we want to scale to is horizontal. In this case, you'll need to use the Crop tool.

How to Use the Picnik Crop Tool to Resize Photos & Images

1. The first step is to upload your photo by clicking the Upload button
2. Once the photo is loaded, click the Crop button. Next we'll enter the first dimension 300, then the second dimension 200 - you should now see the Crop Markers sized to 300x200. In the example below you'll notice that the Crop Markers are focusing on too much detail and if we save our image now the photo is not going to be ideal because we're up too close to the action.
3. By checking the Scale Photo option, I can drag and adjust the Crop Markers to include as much or as little of the image action as I want without affecting the 300x200 dimensions I entered.
4. Once I've adjusted the Crop Markers and click the OK button, you'll see that the photo is now 300x200 and is cropped into a nice view of the photo.

To help you better understand what DNS Propagation is, it's best to learn a little about how DNS actually works. After a website has been set up with your hosting provider, a Master DNS Record is created in their Domain Name Servers (DNS). From here, the company you paid in order to own your domain name (a.k.a. domain registrar) points to your web host's DNS server which serves as the master authority of your domain.

For outside sources that are attempting to learn how to find your website, they must first locate the registration database to find out who maintains the DNS authority of your website. From there, they visit your hosting provider's DNS servers in an effort to establish your domain name's IP Address. This enables an audience to view your website.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to this process. In order to actually facilitate and speed up the rate at which customers can view the internet, each Internet Server Provider (ISP) caches their DNS records. When an Internet Server Provider (ISP) does this, it means that they create their own copy of the master records. Instead of looking them up on the Internet each time someone wants to view a website, the ISP reads from them locally. Reading the cached records locally helps to speed up the return time involved when it comes to a web browser requesting to lookup a domain for an answer. It also helps to reduce the amount of traffic on the web, ultimately allowing it to work much faster.

The biggest disadvantage to this process is the fact that it is typical for each company or ISP to update their cached DNS Records every few days. While it is not thought of as a standard, these companies or ISP's can schedule these updates to take place anywhere from every few hours to several days apart. This slow form of updating a server's cache is referred to as propagation because your website's DNS information will be propagated across all DNS servers on the web. Once this process is completed, your website will be up, running and catering to your audience. Ultimately, it can take anywhere from a day to several days for DNS changes to be in effect since the cache time is different for all servers.

Thanks to the EDC Southwest California, one of our web consultants, Michael Hooper, was fortunate enough to recently tour the brand new Loma Linda University Medical Center that is currently being built in Murrieta, CA. We feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to report back to you what we've learned from this experience.

Hospital Features

Opening in March of 2011, the brand new Loma Linda University Medical Center will bring its widely known reputation of exceptional health services to a new, state of the art community setting. The new hospital will service Southern California's southwest Riverside County, which includes the communities of Murrieta, Temecula, Menifee, Canyon Lake, Wildomar and Lake Elsinore. Ultimately, Murrieta will be able to provide the highest quality of medical care in a faith-based environment.

Career Opportunities

In addition to incomparable health services, the new Medical Center wants to help the community grow by hiring an extraordinary and one of a kind team of talented individuals dedicated to providing world-class medical services. The hospital hopes that these new employment opportunities will allow for economic growth and community stimulation. The new hospital will be providing an incredible variety of career opportunities, in areas like:

Medical Services

Once a skilled a knowledgeable team is assembled, persons from all over southwest Riverside County will have access to a variety of medical services such as:

The Loma Linda University Medical Center is bound to exceed our expectations once it has been completed and given the opportunity to provide. We were absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to witness and showcase a Medical Center with such an extraordinary reputation and look forward to seeing the finished hospital in March of 2011!

You may not realize, but duplicate content is actually one of the major issues many websites unknowingly face. Not only can it prove to be detrimental to your site, it also wastes a search engines' resources and reduces the quality of search results for users.

So what is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content can be best described as having either identical or similar blocks of content on different sites or even the same one. Duplicate content is ultimately the result of content either being copy and pasted to another site or page of a site or not taking the time to truly paraphrase it to create something new and 100% unique. This means that changing only a few words here or there won't fly.

The Effects of Duplicate Content

A site's rankings can drop dramatically. Search engines were designed to basically crawl, analyze and index each page of a web site so duplicate content can confuse and create more work for it. A search engine will end up having to spend more time deciphering which site or page to rank if identical content is found on other sites or pages. In the end, a search engine will look at which site or page has the most domain authority or the most links coming to the page. Essentially, the search engine will make an executive decision based on the terms being targeted, page relativity and the history of the site or page. So it is likely that a site's ranking will be affected.

What to do?

For starters, make sure that only 100% unique new content gets put on your page or website. It is important that you take the time to either sit down and write it yourself or spend time thoroughly paraphrasing and reworking pre-existing content.

Secondly, make sure that all content relates specifically to each singular page. For example, if you have a real estate site with one page devoted to real estate in general and another devoted to selling real estate, it is important that the content on the real estate page stay general and broad, while the selling real estate page specifically talks about promoting and selling real estate properties. This ensures that each page is crawled, analyzed and indexed correctly.

Lastly, if you discover that another site has content that was 100% unique to you alone you have two options. One, you can attempt to get in touch with the webmaster of that site and simply request that they remove the content from their site considering it doesn't benefit either party. However, it is important to not accuse them of stealing it as it could turn out to be someone that thought they were helping to drive traffic to your site without realizing that there could be issues. If requesting removal through the webmaster fails, you can then report them to a search engine like Google.

For More Information

For more information, visit the following link where you can find out how Google defines duplicate content. You can also visit or call our SEO management department at 1-866-734-9946 for more information on how we can help you improve your SEO rankings.

This is where Murrieta stepped in. Murrieta is currently attempting to persuade Google into utilizing the city for Google's Fiber for Communities experimental project. Murrieta is hoping that by getting selected as a test site for Google's intensely high-speed internet, they would be able to attract new forms of technology related businesses. By having this new form of technology here, it would add new enticements and encourage business growth. Murrieta is a young, strong technology savvy community, which helps to make it the ideal community for its trial.

Murrieta, CA is currently one of 1,100+ communities competing for a chance to be one of Google's Test spots. They have enlisted the help of a number of local city offices and a number of local city endorsements to produce a strong campaign. After being one of the very first communities in the nation to have been completely wired with Verizon's FIOs services, it is clear that Google's new Fiber for Communities project would only help to expedite the cities 20 year goal of becoming a technology hub.