We were able to successfully provide Diesel Salon with a highly functional website that allows them to update their website on their own. We also took the opportunity to upgrade their brand image with new graphic design elements and an over-all improvement in user-friendliness and flow.

Goals and Objectives

1. Create a branded business website that will showcase Diesel Salon’s services
2. Empower employee interaction with clients and convert traffic into leads
3. Be easily able to update the content/information on the website

The Solution

1. Branded Web Design
2. Custom functionality implementation to include
   • Individual employee profiles where the stylists clients can come and leave comments or view their stats (setup and tutorial support for their new features)
   • Easily up-datable “Look Book” to showcase the salon’s ever growing hair styles and looks
   • “Book Now” call to action button to increase bookings
   • “Ask a stylist” feature to increase client/salon interactions
   • Integrated blog to organically attract new clients through in-bound marketing
3. Text/Video Tutorials for the use of the website
4. Consultation and Guidance

Development platform: WordPress

What Diesel Salon had to say on Yelp…

The Office Squad was looking to re-design their current website to establish more user-friendliness and better “conversion” of visits into leads. We also updated their websites over-all graphic design elements to represent their brand to their ideal clientele in a more effective manner.
Services Provided:

1. Branded Web Design
2. Professional Content Writing
3. Text/Video Tutorials for the use of the website
4. Consultation and Guidance

The Challenge

Angel’s Tattoos is a new tattoo parlor coming onto the scene and was looking to establish themselves with a branded online presence and an online marketing campaign in order to attract their “target market” into taking action with them.

Goals and Objectives

1. Create a branded business website that will showcase Angel’s Tattoos services and convert traffic into leads
2. Drive “target market” traffic to the website using SEO, Social Media Marketing and “stay in touch” marketing
3. Track user activities and prepare meaningful reports for the business
4. Be easily able to update the content/information on the website
5. Showcase tattoos in an easy to navigate fashion

The Solution

1. Logo Design
2. Branded Web Design
3. Professional Content Writing
4. Search Engine Optimization
5. Social Media Marketing including branded profile design
6. In-bound marketing using HubSpot software
7. Domain name registration, website hosting
8. Business Card Design
9. Printing (for business cards)
10. Text/Video Tutorials for the use of the website
11. Consultation and Guidance

Development Platform: WordPress

Ashley came to us looking for a website that could represent his brand to his current clients and also to potential new clients. From his Logo and stationary to his website and content writing, we focused all of our attention on helping Ashley create a brand image that would empower him to increase sales and position himself online as a professional in his industry.

Goals and Objectives

1. Create branded image (Logo, stationary, etc.)
2. Create branded online presence to position himself as a professional online and utilize as a sales tool
3. Be able to make updates to “office of the week”, Blog and calendar sections of the website

The Solution

1. Logo creation
2. Stationary creation
3. Branded web design
4. Branded website content writing
5. Calendar and “office of the week” gallery functionality implementation
6. Consultation and Guidance
7. Text and Video tutorials for continued editing of his website
8. Domain name registration, website hosting
9. Printing (for stationary)

Development platform: WordPress

Whether it is business in general, your website or your personal life…the more in-tune, educated and experienced you become with any part of your life, putting first things first becomes more and more evident.

I think it is a common trait for entrepreneurs to move forward with an idea regardless of the planning and preparation that is sometimes needed.  I think this is a strength.  Yet I think there still needs to be a balance as well.

Here is an example:

Lets say your going to build or have someone build a website for you.  Where do you start?  I think most people (including myself) try to get something up fairly quickly and then focus on trying to get traffic to the site.  That seems normal right?

Let me be very clear in saying this:  ***You are potentially wasting your time (and money)***

Let me support my last comment with a numbered list descending to the first thing you should do:

9.  How can you have an prosperous business online if you have no traffic?

8.  How can you have traffic if you don’t do SEO and social media marketing?

7.  How could you effectively do SEO and social media marketing if you don’t have a branded website?

6.  How could you have a branded website if you don’t have a brand?

5.  How could you have a brand if you don’t know who your niche/target market/ideal client is?

4.  How could you have a niche/target market/ideal client if you haven’t done a business plan?

3.  How could you have a business plan if you haven’t established values, goals and principles to consciously live by (in business and personal life)?

2.  How could you have goals, values, etc. if you have not written a “life’s” and “business” mission statement?

1.  How could you write a mission statement if you don’t put first things first? :)

The simple answer is that you “can not”.  In order to achieve anything ***effectively*** listed above you need to do the the thing that comes before it.  Too many times small business owners put the chicken before the egg and pay for it with their time and money.  Think about it.  If you purchase a “quick” website for $500 and find out later that it is not working for you in any way shape or form…you have lost $500.  The same thing applies to every aspect of your online ventures.  You will eventually realize that the “quick” and cheap solution is not doing anything for you and then you will have to do it all over again.  You would save money in fact if you just invested properly from the beginning.

If you “invest” into your business properly from the beginning and put first things first, you will reap the benefits of whatever you have invested 100 times over.

The good thing is that you can always go back and do the thing that maybe you overlooked or missed.  The further you get into these types of things, the more it becomes very clear that some things needed to be done first.  You will know what they are.

Take the time, do the work.

This article on putting first things first was written by Shane Snyder Co-Founder and Project Manager of Pixel Me Pink a San Diego Web Design business.

2.  What is conversion optimization?   

3.  How do you do it?

4.  Putting first things first

In todays internet marketing world, terms like “SEO”, “Social Media Marketing” and “increased traffic” are becoming recognized and used frequently.

The idea is that if you drive a bunch (I use “bunch” loosely :) of traffic to your website, you will get more sales in your business and this is partially true. The thing is, in order to receive a noticeable result (people calling you) you need to have quite a bit of traffic because on average the majority of the people who visit your website will never contact you. In order to get “quite a bit” of traffic you need to do some SEO work to your site, or pay someone to do it for you. This takes time and a substantial budget with the right company to really do things correctly and so what do you do in the meantime? Or a better question is…what should you do from the very beginning?
 

Build or augment your website into one that “CONVERTS!”

Let me ask you a few questions to get the juices flowing:

1. What is the point of sending a “bunch” of traffic to your site if there is nothing enticing them to do anything while they are there?

2. Or better yet, what is the point in having a website AT ALL if it doesn’t work FOR you? Meaning drive traffic into becoming a sale.

Before you consider doing any SEO or developing a social media marketing campaign, you should make sure that your website is set up so that when it DOES get a substantial amount of traffic or any traffic, that it can convert it into a sale.
 

So what is conversion optimization specifically?

Quick definition: Conversion optimization is the process of strategically implementing different “calls to action” and user friendliness/flow tactics so that you can convert as much of the traffic you do get, into taking action on your website in whatever way that may be.

This could be anything from contacting you by phone, signing up for your newsletter, taking advantage of an “irresistible free offer”, to simply guiding the potential visitor through the website to see/read/interact with the information you would like to feature the most.

By employing conversion optimization into your site, you will increase your websites effectiveness dramatically.
 

So how do you do it?

1. First things first.  Have you ever heard of an “irresistible free offer”?

Put yourself in your ideal clients shoes and imagine something that would really solve your most common problem or provide you with something that you would be very interested in. For example, if you were a dentist you could put a “free teeth whitening” call to action on your website so that when potential visitors came to your site, instead of leaving the site without interacting with you they may sign up for the free teeth whitening thereby providing you with an opportunity to build a relationship with this person and potentially provide them with more services.

This free offer should be something that is EASY for you to give away for free, something that you may already do all of the time, while at the same time enticing an ideal client to contact you or somehow provide you with their information. Think “top ten” lists, informational reports, instructional video…

2. Usability/Flow. It is important to know this simple fact: people do not want to see everything about your business on every single page of your website.

What are the top 3 features of your business? What are the 3 top things that your IDEAL clientele are interested in? Focus on these core features on your home page and your main navigation and you will benefit greatly. This doesn’t mean that you can not expound upon other aspects of your business, but these things can be organized and put to great use in a blog or linked to throughout the main pages of your site for the people that want to view this more detailed secondary information.

Once you have chosen the top 3 features of your business that your ideal clientele is most interested in, be sure to have each page guide the visitor through the website in a natural and flowing manner. Using our dentist as an example, if a visitor is on the “about” page and something about the dentist’s experience, schooling or credentials makes them want to call in for a consultation, a link to the contact page or the dentists telephone number should be made very apparent. Or lets say this visitor would like to see some of the dentists work. Somewhere on that page should be a link or a call to action to view the gallery of the dentists past dental work.

The point is to have each page of your website link to or somehow flow into the other pages of your website in a manner that is conducive to the content being shown at the time.

3. Simplicity. How many times have you been to a website and had 70 potential choices to make?

Because it is natural to want to share EVERYTHING about your business with a potential visitor, all too often you see websites that have far too much going on. This creates “choice paralysis”.

Again, the important part here is to focus on the most appealing or sought-after features of your business and bolster them. I know you want visitors to know about who you are, what services you have, check out your portfolio, read your most recent blog post, check out your new sale, sign up for your newsletter, etc., etc., etc…but by cramming all of that onto each page, not only will most people simply leave your website, the people who were genuinely interested in your business will become confused because of all of the options pulling at them and take no action at all. It’s the websites that focus on what their perspective ideal clients biggest concerns or desires that convert the most traffic into sales.
 

Putting first things first

At the end of the day conversion optimization is what will get the phone ringing. Use these 3 steps on your website and you will benefit from a higher conversion rate, from a higher quality of client.

Written by Shane Snyder, Co-Founder of Pixel Me Pink a San Diego Web Design company

Today we are giving some love to the start-up businesses of the world.  We were all there at some point and so I think it’s important to help them become successful as soon as possible.  Especially in today’s world.

Starting a business is exciting, sometimes scary and can sometimes be confusing so below are a few tips to help you out.

Tip 1 – Make decisions quickly and without regret.

• You started a business right?  That probably took a lot of courage and faith to do and so as you move forward with your business continue with making decisions based on passion and from the “gut”.  In the beginning you need all of the momentum you can get so don’t allow the opinions of others or outside information to slow you down or make you second guess yourself.

• There are so many things to consider and to evaluate in the beginning of owning a business and so making quick, decisive decisions based on the best information that is available at the time will keep things moving forward.  You can always fix something in the future, but if you slow down because of “choice paralysis” you could end up without a business!

• If you are afraid of making decisions quickly because you might “mess up”, you are probably comparing yourself to other more established businesses and this is pointless as you are different and should be!  Your also forgetting that the majority of your business systems and success is going to come about BECAUSE you made these mistakes.  You can not learn anything and make things better for yourself and your industry if you don’t know what those problems are.  MAKE MISTAKES! they are good for you :)

Tip 2 – Represent yourself as you actually are.

• If you are a home based operation do not pretend to be like you are some kind of large corporation!

• I think almost everyone runs into this issue in the beginning.  I know that we did it in the beginning of Pixel Me Pink and I know now how silly it really is.  Think about it…you probably started your own business to make things better in your industry, to break the mold of how things are done because you know you can do it better!  So why do we think that we should answer the phone like a call center, or say “we” when really there is just you and the cat and copy all of the other things that somehow has been deemed the “right” way to do business.

• People are not turned off by home operations or smaller start-ups like you may think.  There are benefits to working with these types of businesses and people know that.  So by “acting” like you are something that you are not, not only are you attracting the WRONG type of clientele for yourself, you are also basically lying.  This white lie will come out eventually in one form or another and that is no way to start the reputation of your new business.

• When doing your marketing or basically representing yourself at any point it is so important to be who you really are.  The reason for this is because every business has an “Ideal Client”.  Really, the last thing you want to do is attract ALL and ANY business you can get…even in the beginning.  If you are attracting clients that you can not take care of properly or that for some reason do not jive with you and your business model you will in fact “lose” money every time.

Tip 3 – Don’t make your prices low just because you are new

• Look, I get it.  Your new.  Maybe you are not yet comfortable with charging what your really worth because you feel like if people know that your new that you wouldn’t be able to charge the same as someone else.  Maybe because of some random fears that are deep within your sub-conscious (that were probably cultivated when you were 10 years old) you feel like there is no way you could charge what you need for your business to be successful.

• There is nothing wrong with giving discounts and having sales and in some situations there is nothing wrong with doing free work so that you can gain some exposure or build your portfolio.  But there is a big difference between doing that and making your prices extremely low just so that you can get more clients.  Remember you will attract the wrong type of clients because of this (people looking to scrape the bottom of the barrel usually expect more then what they are paying for and will never value what you do).

• Instead start your business with a fair rate that will keep your business thriving.  It will be much harder to raise your prices in the future then it will be to lower them and you also need to remember that you and your business can only help so many people in the world if it is broke all of the time as compared to how many people it could help if it is successful and fueled by the energy of money.

• If you make your prices low you could start a butterfly effect of destroying your own industry.  If you make your prices far below that of your competitors suddenly they will need to lower their prices as well to stay in the game.  The entire standard of pricing in your industry will eventually change to be much lower and so when you are finally ready to raise your prices you won’t be able to because those prices are now not seen as “standard” by the common public (remember you are not the only new business in your industry doing this).  Not to mention this could negatively effect the other companies in your industry, possibly put them out of business and hurt your economy even further.  Of course this is a bit of a dramatization, but I think you get the point :).

Tip 4 – Treat your business and responsibilities as if it were a 9 to 5 job

• It’s a new business so of course you want to work 50 hours a day and 9 days a week.  STOP! :)

• “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” – Parkinson’s Law.  This is to say that because you have told yourself it is acceptable to work 70 hours a day and 14 days a minute that the work that needs to be done will always take up the available time.

• Instead you should always have a plan of action for each day.  You can then focus on one task at a time that is within any project you are working on.  Sure there will be some distractions as you probably “where all of the hats”, but no matter what happens you should redirect your entire focus into whatever task you have set forth for yourself and do not stop or move on to anything else until it is completed.

• Having a set of working hours will also do many things for you and your business.  Your clients will respect you more.  You will complete tasks faster.  You will inherently gain more control and structure over your business in general.  You will prioritize better and you will have a more balanced life-style. I don’t care WHO you are…if you don’t get some rest, entertainment and physical activity, you will eventually sputter out and lose all of the ground you have worked so hard to gain.  You will have more energy to handle the important things you need to do on a daily basis which will provide you with a better end result in the long term.

Tip 5 – Don’t be afraid to share some of the responsibilities

• One of the biggest if not THE BIGGEST mistakes a new business can make is being scared to hire people.  Whether it is an intern, part-time or full-time help, there is nothing that can help your business grow faster and better short of tripping over a rainbow and falling into a pot of gold.

• Fabienne Fredrickson may or may not have coined the term “brilliance work”, but what it means is vitally important to your future success.  Everyone has it.  It is the type of work that your not good at or excellent at.  It’s  the type of work that you are utterly “brilliant” at.  This is up to you to figure out.  At the same time other people in this world are brilliant at something that they can probably help you with in your business.  It could be aspects of accounting or managerial work.  It doesn’t matter.  What’s important is that you find people to help you based on THEIR brilliance work and not how low you can pay someone to do a crappy job for you.

• THIS IS SO IMPORTANT!!!  Every-time you do a task that could be done by another person better and more efficiently, you are literally losing money.  The sooner you can come to accept this the sooner your business will flourish.

• Here is a great example:  we once had a client who was managing their own twitter account for 30 minutes a day.  They had been doing this for 6 months.  Not only could this client of ours not manage their account as good as we could (because it is our brilliance work) or derive the results they were looking for, this client had also lost money 2 times.

Once was because he spent 30 minutes a day for 6 months.  That comes to 90 hours and his hourly rate happens to be $100 per hour.  So he spent $9,000.00 to obtain 600 followers on twitter with no return on his “time” investment.

The second way that he lost money was because for 90 hours he could have been focusing on his “brilliance work” and the after effect of working on your brilliance work is always further business success, monetarily or otherwise.

To have hired us to do it for him it would have cost a total of $174.00 ($29 times 6 months) and he would have received more twitter followers that were specifically interested in what he does and definitely would have received a return on his investment because of the free training and material we provide.

To conclude

I truly hope this helps you break out of some of the molds that have been put in place by old beliefs and habits.  To have started a business you are a rare kind of person.  Embrace this and remember that you can have anything you want in life by literally and simply envisioning what you want, believing that it is for you to have and putting one foot in front of the other in pursuit of it.

As long as you don’t quit, no matter the mistakes…you can never actually fail.

Let’s paint a picture…

Somewhere in let’s say Georgia there is a guy sitting down at his computer and looking for somewhere to eat when he goes to California on vacation. He’s just typing words into the computer. Words that any normal person would type; “best San Diego Restaurant” “Seafood San Diego”, etc.  As a restaurant owner you would want to come up for that search. Easy enough, right? Right! This is where it all starts. The KEYWORD.

Keyword research is something that is often overlooked by small business owners, mostly because they don’t really understand it.  The assumption is, if you have a website, they will come. If you blog, they will come. If you have pretty pictures, they will come. Not true! They will only come if they can FIND you. It is your job (or your web professional) to hone in on what your ideal clients are typing in the search bar to find you.

If for some reason the budget isn’t available to have a professional do keyword research for you, we at least want to make sure you have some tools to do it yourself. So we’re giving you a way you can do it for free because it’s just THAT important to your web presence.

So here we go!
Using keywords effectively can be broken down into two steps.
Step 1 – Keyword Research
Step 2 – Placing your keywords strategically into your website

Today we’ll cover the first.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

The objective is simple. Find words that a potential client would type in to find you. Compile a nice list, and then implement them. The tough part is, how do you compete with the thousands of other sites that are doing the same thing?

This is where the COMPETITIVE RATIO comes in (the picture to the right is showing competition results in the “green bars” that relates to “PPC” or “pay per click”.  This does not necessarily apply to the competition level by actual websites that are coming up first for a particular search).

Say you sell pet supplies. If you simply focus on the keyword phrase “pet supplies” your small business is now competing with websites like PETCO, Pet Smart and several other big name companies with big marketing budgets. Instead, try and find keywords that are still being searched, but are not being focused on as much yet and are still relevant to your business. Keywords that you will have a more realistic shot at competing for.

For example, if you do most of your business locally, try adding your location to the search term, ie: “pet supplies san diego”. The searches for this term may be less but the competition is less as well, thus giving it a better ratio.  The fact that your website and business is also more closely related to the search (pet supplies in san diego) means that the people that visit your site will have a higher chance of “converting” into a sale.

Here is a more detailed example:

Let’s pretend you own a dog grooming business for celebrities in Hollywood.  Which searches would you want to come up for?

Of course at first glance you may feel compelled to go for the search term that has a high amount of searches, but you have to consider the quality of those searches.  The majority of the people typing in “dog grooming” are not even looking for a service like yours.  Some of those searches could even be someone doing research on the dog grooming industry to see if they want to start a career or business in that field.  Also, keep in mind that because the competition that is already on the first page for that search term is high, it would take a fairly large monthly budget and a lot more time in order to “beat” all of those other websites.

Now with the other search (Celebrity pet grooming Hollywood), you may only have 1,000 people searching for that per month, but they are looking for exactly what you do and so your conversion rate will be high.  You will also be able to be on the top of the first page in Google for that search with a smaller monthly budget and in a smaller amount of time because the completion level is much lower.  

Really it’s important to keep things simple, try not to over-complicate the process and think like your ideal clients think.  What searches are people doing that your business is specific or at least relevant to?  It is also important to focus on just 1 or 2 main keyword terms in the beginning, and depending on the situation, probably in the future as well.
OK, so now you have picked 10 or so keywords that you would like to come up for in Google.  Now what?  How do you dwindle them down to just 1 or 2 main keyword terms that you are going to focus on?

You need to type them into Google and see who shows up.  Out of those websites that show up in the first 3 positions you need to find out how much THEY have invested in their own SEO.  How many pages do they have on the site?  How many “backlinks” do they have for their site?  What is their page rank?  All of these things and more need to be analyzed before choosing the keywords that you want to try and be at the top for. We have our own tools but below are a list of tools that you can use to do some of this research on your own.  Remember that you should have a professional doing this for you if possible as there are many other aspects that need to be analyzed, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be helped before you have a workable budget :)

Tools to check out the competition:

Google Adwords can be used to find out how many people are searching per month for a specific “keyword phrase” and it will also show you the competition level on that keyword phrase for “PPC” also called “Pay per click”.

Googling “site:competitorsite.com” shows how many pages a competitor has in total.

Yahoo Site Explorer finds how many back-links a competitor has.

Google Page Rank shows the over-all “page rank” of a competitor.  In general the higher the number, the more clout they have with Google.

Once you have used these tools to get a general idea of the competition level for each keyword you are considering to focus on you can pick the best and easiest 1 or 2 out of the list and start your campaign.

KEYWORD INTENTION

Take our company for example. Most people would think it obvious for us to want “Web Design” as one of our keywords. The truth is though; someone who types in “Web Design” could be a student looking for more information on the industry, someone wanting to see examples of good web design to put in their blog, etc.

As long as the search volume is still there, the more specific you can get the better. For example, “ affordable web design ” or “ san diego web design ”.

This is just a guess, but as a small to medium sized business owner I am going to assume that you have a website so that you can make more sales?  So if someone types in “dog grooming” or “dog groomer”, which one do you think is actually looking for a service to spend money with?

So have fun with it and remember to keep yourself grounded.  It’s really easy to over analyze this process and of course you want to focus on the right words for your business, but if you simply hone in on specific keywords that are highly relevant to your business and then understand the intention behind those searches, you will do just fine.