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Posted by
AngieWeeks
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1:06 PM
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Labels: Cal Coast News, DIY - Do It Yourself, DIY SEO - Do It Yourself SEO
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Often times I need to get on a computer at the office when I'm back at home. Sometimes its to get an image, other times its to upload a site that's sitting on that system. Most of the time, its to upload your Web Position Rankings reports for monthly website marketing SEO clients.
There have also been occasions where I have needed to allow access to my computer for someone else to get on it. Once it was for repair that was outside of my capabilities.
Sometimes clients at Cal Coast will need to install the software so that we can access their computer to show them how to do something virtually or even to perform a custom online project.
If you need to access your PC from anywhere else, please feel free to use the following instructions to help you do so using our preferred tool called LogMeIn.
Posted by
Cal Coast
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3:15 PM
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Labels: Applications, CCWD Favorite Vendors, CCWD Technology Favorites, DIY - Do It Yourself, FAQs - General, Practical Computer Tips
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We attended a nice webinar this morning from Ion Interactive about website Landing pages.
What is a LANDING PAGE? Landing pages are a campaign, ad, or 'message specific' page on your website.
Landing pages are typically created to live outside of the structure of the main site, because they are designed to bring specific traffic into the website.
Here's an example: Google "limo driver jobs in orange county", notice in the organic listing for ExcelFleetLimo.com it takes you directly to the JOBS page. THIS is a landing page designed to drive interest for this particular keyword phrase :)
There are no hard and fast rules for landing page best practices. Common best practices are:
1. Maintaining continuity from click to conversion (match ad to landing page, etc)
2. Constant testing (use analytics and A-B testing for maximum results)
3. Audience segmentation (know your target markets and separate them accordingly)
4. Speed and agility (landing pages need to load fast, AND you need to respond instantly)
A lot more goes into a landing page than just throwing up a new page on your website. Landing pages need to consider design, strategy, coding, writing, analytics, and testing. Its easy to spend a month creating one landing page!
How can we simplify the process? How can we as online marketers get rid of the friction in the process? Well, its mostly about creating a consistent strategy and not spinning our wheels doing a bunch of ad hoc afterthoughts. Yes, throwing a page up may get the job done, but lack of planning is going to get you underperforming pages. Every landing page needs a purpose and a goal.
How can you automate and better manage this landing page process? Try this flow:
1. Create
2. Review
3. Launch
4. Test
5. Analyze. for best results try to do this AS the traffic comes in, not after.
6. Iterate
7. Organize
Think about what your needs are today, and what they will be tomorrow and in the future. A word to the wise: Don't fight hundreds or thousands of landing pages! The more specific your page is, the better it will convert!! Landing pages get MORE and BETTER conversions than most normal website pages.
How can you keep the above uncluttered? Well, there are a few ways. Most are simple solutions, but so many companies are all over the place. If you're one of them, try these suggestions:
1. Use a central repository for your landing pages and components
2. Minimize your IT dependancy
3. Use templates - this helps keep your brand consistent too
4. Get your content pre-approved
5. Standardize your data collection and forms - if your leads dont import to your database from these landing pages you could be in big trouble; or be up all night doing data entry.
Are there tools to help? There are!!! Look into the LiveBall landing page management platform :) Don't know HTML? That's ok, its a WYSIWYG!
Ion did case studies with their clients using the above tool, and ALL the websites have an increased conversion rate. A significant increase! Isn't that want you wanted?
What landing pages have you created recently? How are they working out for you? If you need help you can always call us @ 888-281-7665 or comment your questions on this post - obviously this web optimization isn't simple potatoes is it?!
Posted by
AngieWeeks
at
10:50 AM
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Labels: Converting Users, Landing Pages, Testing and Tuning
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Whether created by you, your boss, or the Cal Coast Web Design team themselves, your Facebook Fans page was built as a means to market your product or service, to market your company, & to establish your brand! In today's day and age, your competitors are maintaining a social network. You need to be too. We know you're busy. Let us train one of your employees, friends or family members to help you maintain just a few minutes a day before or after checking your email.
Whether getting ready to do yourself or passing along to a helping hand, you need to get educated with Facebook fans page 101 if you want your business to be a thriving part of the web marketing experience where companies continue to flourish even in a daunting economy.
It can mean the difference in hundreds of leads.
FIRST THINGS FIRST, your Facebook account is connected to dozens or even hundreds of friends/fans (or soon will be). Every time you make an announcement, it goes out to all your friends. When they reply, it goes to theirs. Instantly you have hundreds of salesmen and new potential customers notified of your business update.
See more about this with this video explanation by Cal Coast founder, Angie Weeks at an Orange County LeTip meeting...
The ultimate point of this whole Facebook game is to keep people engaged in actively serving as your salesman and also constantly knowing whats new so that they too may be regular customers. We can take action with that we don't know of. Keep the web informed where nearly 80% off even OFFLINE purchases start!
You want to make your page worth staying on and coming back to. The best way to do that is with engaging updating content!! There are literally 1000s of things you can do with your Facebook Fans page. Lets start with setting your page up to be worthy of promotion....
1. Update your wall. Once your logged in, you are often times defaulted to post on your wall. Keep in mind that this is an editable option so some fan page may have an alternate default page. Simply select your "Wall" tab at any time to see your overall list of "to-dones." This is a list of all the actions you recently took on Facebook be it posting images, making friends or otherwise. Letting people know what your up to means letting them trust you. People shop with those they trust.
So, keep them updated. Just simply post. Tell them what your up to. Here are a few ideas to get you started.


What to get extra geeky? Update your facebook through twitter using the Twitter Facebook application HERE.
Want to keep your personal twitter updates off of your Fan page? You can use the Selective Twitter Status Facebook application to only update with a separate account when using "#fb" tag in your tweet.
Cal Coast offers one-on-one Facebook Fans optimization and maintenance training.
Posted by
Angela Collins
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10:33 PM
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Labels: DIY - Do It Yourself, Driving Traffic Without Google, Facebook, Online Reputation Management, SMO - Social Media Optimization, Social Networking, Twitter
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You hear it from us ALL the time, but hey maybe hearing it from a Marketing Writer may help too! Here's a guest post from Linda Coss, fellow SOC Chamber member with Plumtree Marketing. Linda's offering some ideas on what the heck to blog about, which is such a common question in the blogosphere. I'm going to link Linda's suggestions to an example post from various clients and friends so you can see how its done.
Blogging can be an excellent way to drive traffic to your website and build your reputation as an expert in your field. The catch, though, is that you have to keep coming up with ideas for what to blog about - day after day, week after week. Here are 11 ideas to get your creative juices flowing.
Posted by
AngieWeeks
at
9:30 AM
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Labels: Blogs / Blogging Strategies, Content and Copyright
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Its funny, a man walked into Orange County Computer today and I overheard his conversation from our back office. He said he never uses the phone book anymore, but he did THIS time to find computer repair services, because its so hard to find what he's looking for locally. I sighed and laughed, I KNOW!
We don't read a lot of good news, so I will take a moment to report some myself! I was just doing some keyword research with Google's keyword selector tool, and I'm happy to report that search volume is above normal for many industries. What does this mean? Well, it means more and more people are searching for things. Hopefully, your business has those things they are searching for...
These numbers aren't so bad...are they?!?
Posted by
AngieWeeks
at
9:59 PM
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Labels: Keyword Research, Local Search
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Posted by
Angela Collins
at
4:52 PM
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Labels: Blogs / Blogging Strategies, Content and Copyright, DIY - Do It Yourself, DIY SEO - Do It Yourself SEO, FAQs - Search Engine Optimization, Google News / Products, Landing Pages, SEO
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Calling all happy and unhappy clients from both sides of the fence!
Yellow Book vs SEO
Where should you spend your marketing dollars???
We're getting a TON of calls from Orange County businesses who want to better spend their marketing money, they are saying that the yellow pages doesn't work for them anymore. Are you finding the same thing, or are your phones still ringing from the books?
We seriously want to know. How much are you spending? How much are you getting? If you've been doing either for years, what has been the ongoing trend? More and more business? Less and less business?
We want to hear from all industries. If you had $1000 a month to spend on marketing, WHERE are those dollars best spent? Maybe your comments will convince us to take out a full page ad in the book...or maybe they will send us running.
If you're a non-business owner or one who doesn't advertise, how do YOU find a local business? Do you go to a book or the internet? If book, which book? If online, which search engine?
WE WANT COMMENTS FROM ALL PEANUTS IN THE ORANGE COUNTY GALLERY! Inquiring minds want to know...
Here are some other interesting blog posts on the subject...everyone has an opinion....what's yours!?:
http://blog.siterevamp.com/2007/05/yellow-pages-vs-search-engines.html
http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2007/09/24/search-engine-optimization-through-yellow-pages/
http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Yellow-Pages-vs-SEO-Marketing&id=1669935
Posted by
AngieWeeks
at
2:25 PM
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Labels: Driving Traffic Without Google, Offline Marketing, SEO
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Check out our new video media special with Miller Farm Media - we'll record your LeTip speech and then put it out across the internet.
Colonel is a long - time member of OC LeTip and he really knows his stuff when it comes to Orange County Health Food Stores. You can find his store at:
Health Works and Juice Bistro
27271-A La Paz RD
Laguna Niguel, CA 92677
Posted by
Cal Coast
at
10:35 AM
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Labels: CCWD Favorite Vendors, Orange County Resources
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Decided to add the search feature to my sites today. Here's a lil walk through....
Want help monetizing your blog or website with Google AdSense? Contact Cal coast at 888-281-7665 or Info@CalCoastWebDesign.com
OR, just simply comment below.
Happy AdSense-ing!
Posted by
Angela Collins
at
9:49 PM
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Labels: DIY - Do It Yourself, Google News / Products, PPC
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I feel like I take forever to figure out how to use new systems, new interfaces, new forums, new add ons, and new gadgets. I'm committing to stop "just doing" and START SHARING. And so now you have it, instructions for FTP in Yahoo hosting...
Login at https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.src=fpctx&.done=http://www.yahoo.com using the username and password associated with your Yahoo address.
On the right under the user's name, click on "Mail."
On the left under the apple icon, click the "yourdomainname" link under the Mail Accounts heading
On the top right click "Manage my Services"
On the left click "Web Hosting" control panel
Click the "Manage Tab"
Click "File Manager" – this takes you into the main web directory.
For the love....Make sure you don't delete anything! These are your website files.
To backup first, click "Download Files" when selected.
In order to upload a file, click"Upload Files" on the right.
If you need to upload anything to a folder (i.e. - images), you have to click the folder name, and THEN click upload files on the right.
Viola! FTPing files from Yahoo Business Website Hosting Account!
If you need help with maintenance, repair, marketing, design or other modification to your personal or professional yahoo website, simply contact us at 888-281-7665 or mailto:nInfo@CalCoastWebDesign.com
Or, simply post a comment below ;)
Posted by
Angela Collins
at
8:30 PM
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Labels: Hosting, Yahoo News / Products
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Im cleaning out the oodles and oodles of articles I've been hanging onto as if its easy to search through email folders to find them. Sheesh Angela!
Im going to give ya'll a little treat here and start posting them on the blog for easy access at any time later.
First up... 106 Content Ideas for the REALTOR who has Nothing to Write About
by The Famous Agents Staff.
Its a MUST read for realtors who arent sure just how to drive traffic to your real estate website.
Just a couple of my favorites...
Creating content like this will help not only drive traffic to your site for relevant content by imcreasing your keyword density and adding content, but it can also be used to convert traffic with offerings with this informtaion. Need help getting organized? Contact us today at 888-281-7665 or Info@CalCoastWebDesign.com
Posted by
Angela Collins
at
8:19 PM
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Labels: Advanced Access VA Update, Content and Copyright, CTA: Calling To Action, DIY - Do It Yourself, Real Estate Resources
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I.E. is sooooooo last year. If you haven't already, make the switch to Firefox NOW.
Not only is it SAFER, but there are unlimited Add Ons to make web surfing faster, easier and just plain fun!
Angie & I are away on business for the weekend working on our database, manuals & videos. Its been nothing but a mess. We didn't even get started on what we came here for until just about a couple hours ago because all of the trusted vendors we put in place to help support our business let us down. Harrumph. We were on it right away!
First off all, apologies to those of you who sent an email from Friday, May 9th between 12:00am to 11am. Our email was down thanks to one of our trusted vendors and a silly mistake.
If you visited our website recently, we are aware our videos are not loading. Yet again the fault of a trusted vendor. Hello World really put us in a bad place by losing all of our video collection!
Enough of the complaining though. We mad the calls to tech support and were on our way. Videos are still in the works and email is good to go.
Next it was time to get started and just that we did! My first task....Integrating & archiving emails from Gmail into our SugarCRM database.
We have literally spent months (actually close to a year now) trying to integrate our emails into Sugar using the Sugar email system. No go...and were pretty geeky over here!
Sugar is AMAZING. The only downfall, a lil pricey and no phone support. Pretty difficult to handle a task like this in less than a month without it. So, I had to cruise around all online looking for solutions.
Light bulb! I searched for "Gmail into SugarCRM: and viola! There it was, the first result. A Firefox Add-On called DolceGmail. Its amazing.
Now remember, this is a Firefox Add-On so it will not work in other browsers nor will it work on another computer. You aren't installing it in your gmail, you installing it on the browser on your own system, your own computer.
Lets get started.
How to Use DolceGmail to Get Your Gmail Emails Archived In SugarCRM:
1. CLICK HERE to download the DolceGmail Firefox Add-On
2. Login to your Gmail account
3. Select "DolceGmail Settings" an fill in variables:
Posted by
Angela Collins
at
3:45 PM
1 comments
Labels: Applications, CCWD Favorite Vendors, CCWD Technology Favorites, Databases, Email Marketing
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Today I just wanted to touch on five items you can do to bring yourself success online, and improve Google rankings. Most of these things are easy - the challenge is really consistency!
1. Update your website monthly, weekly, or daily.. depending on what your competitors are doing. The thing about seo is you only need to be one step ahead of the competition - not leaps & bounds. Be careful of web & seo companies who tell you otherwise...they are usually looking to pad their pockets.
2. Maintain your blog. They say "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." Your blog is a great place to show both. What should you blog about? Industry updates, consumer tips, case studies, things your public would like to know. The more educating you do through your website and blog, the LESS time you'll spend on the phone or in person closing the deal.
3. Get your meta tags done. Not yourself. I guarantee you'll guess the wrong keyword phrases....I do this for a living and I still guess wrong. You may say, "So what if I completely ignore or choose the wrong keywords?" People will like my site anyway, I spent a lot of money on it, right? Wrong! Not researching your online demographic is the worst mistake you can make. Keywords are the breadcrumb trail to the pot of gold. Would you build a business with no windows, doors, or a sign? Keywords are your doors and windows to the search engines, and without the right ones you're dead in the water. I know many of you do-it-yourselfers say "I did that on Google already, Angie." Great, you saw the bar for low, medium or high searches. You probably choose all the most popular, and now you're wondering why your website isn't coming up for them...or you're spending hundreds on adwords with no return. Ill tell you a little secret - your pot of gold is not in general or vague search phrases - its in specific niche searches or what is called longtails in our industry. Choosing keywords is a science and Cal Coast has been doing it for years...please let us help you. I'm so sad to hear people who have wasted years online with no keywords or the wrong keywords...they missed so much business. Don't chase your tail like that. Just call us. Were going to help put you in the right place at the right time.
4. Run reports and analytics. Stats aren't enough...they only tell you how many got to your website in most cases. You need to know what keyword phrase sent them there, too. Analytics will tell you this. You need to see the paths they take once they enter your homepage so you can constantly improve your site. You need web position reports so you know where you are ranked, on what engines, and if you moved up or down this month. You all remember to check the stats on your bank accounts and referral sources regularly, and your site and blog are no different. If you're not tracking then you're losing business.
5. Share the love online. Its not just about your website or blog or success. Support eachother! We do testimonials each week in networking groups because they are so important. How many online testimonials do you do, though? Remember the internet doesn't have a max capacity and we all make decisions based off of feedback from others. Start doing yahoo local reviews, commenting on other blogs about people you like doing business with, and offering to have that thank you testimonial you email published. Be sure to include your name, business name and website link, because then this helps your SEO! I always think to myself how cool it would be if we posted all our testimonials online. The internet is a growing beast and not only do you need to be there, you need to get found, and you need to maintain a positive reputation when you are found.
Hopefully this information helps unveil some of the things you can do online to break into internet success. It's only the tip of the iceburg, and we are here to help you. I welcome your questions or would be happy to schedule a consultation with you anytime. 888-281-7665 x 2
Posted by
AngieWeeks
at
9:10 PM
1 comments
Labels: Blogs / Blogging Strategies, Keyword Research, SEO, Web Position
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Looking for a new way to advertise your business?? Facebook is a great way to network with other people and advertise your business. If you have a business then you need to have a "Fan Page" set up. Cal Coast has put together some basic instructions on how to set up this page.
Are you ready to launch your company on Facebook??? Contact Cal Coast Web Design Today for A Quote!
Posted by
Cal Coast
at
3:40 PM
0
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Labels: DIY - Do It Yourself, DIY SEO - Do It Yourself SEO, Driving Traffic Without Google, Facebook, Linking Strategies, SMO - Social Media Optimization, Social Networking
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Grab an amazing collection of Widgets for your blogger blog.There are lots of interesting Widgets available at Blogger Plugins