Posted on: December 18, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
As an online marketing professional for more than fifteen years now, I have always spent my working time building up companies through intensive marketing strategy. It pleases me to no end getting results and innovating for companies.
This website is focused on those companies that generally hire me for 6 months to a year and a half, each for 5-30 hours per week of consulting. Consulting work is constant, very intense work where I’m hired in by a company for specific long term marketing and team building projects.
On the other hand, I’ve also done extensive work running a marketing firm over the years. The benefit here for a company who hires our firm is that they have us closely involved with them longer term. Usually these engagements are for years, so that we can help build up companies month by month. Delivering results, reports, and new innovation launches month after month and year after year is truly something we enjoy and where we excel.
With well over 40 hours of week required of me on a weekly basis, is becomes important to limit how many companies/clients I work for so that I can always ensure top quality work and results.
In terms of why a company wouldn’t try to save money and hire someone internally, I’ll talk about that here. Generally when someone works full time at one company not only are they not exposed to what is happening around the Internet in other verticals, but they may not be driven for many reasons to find the latest and greatest techniques. In my work, I see results of many companies online plus offline, so that I can always know what is working at the moment and where to look for new opportunities to deliver client results. This insight is very useful to companies, as they can know that I’m testing, seeing, and most importantly experiencing a wide range of useful information that can help deliver them results.
Posted on: July 23, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
To feature a business online is an important step these days. There are 15 elements that are very important in getting your new Website online with success. Reading up online, talking with experts, and reading books
are all effective, affordable ways to build up knowledge. Here are 10 top steps with resources and tools to help bring your business online in a very effective manner.
- Select a domain name. Go Daddy and aplus.net have good domain name selection tools.
- Select a company to host your Website. As you research hosting companies online, ensure you check samples of their clients to see how well the Websites rank on search engines and how quickly their Websites load.
- As you plan your Website, a good architecture with strong Web standards and usability, is best written on paper before it is coded.
- Either hire a team to build your Website, use a tool, or you can code it yourself if you have the time to learn. Wordpress and Drupal are my favorite tools. Wordpress is good to build a blog. Drupal is good to build a Website.
- Write great copy to ensure you have the attention of search engines and users / Website readers.
- Build SEO into your Website to ensure you get traffic from good online marketing.
- Make sure you can create images as needed. Adobe Fireworks is a great image tool and there is some excellent documentation on using Adobe Fireworks out there.
- Get a great coding tool to use quickly or in detail as needed for Website posts. Adobe Dreamweaver is terrific and there are very good books one can use.
- Work on conversion and optimization techniques to ensure people don’t just visit your Website, but that they do convert to a lead or sale.
- Leverage landing pages into your website.
- Bring your selling online as well as offline.
- Test, test, test. This means look at your Web analytics and optimize what you do based on your Website statistics.
- Roll out useful, creative new Website enhancements as often as you can.
- Listen to user feedback.
- Keep track of new Web trends.
Tags: business online, new website, Online Marketing, results, SEO, usability, web architecture, web hosting, web tools Filed Under: Building a New Website, Businesses, Online Marketing, SEO, Sales, Website Analytics, Website Sales, Websites
Posted on: June 26, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
Over the years I’ve done a lot of work for companies in regards to either helping them get the right Website built, or hiring the right vendor or team to do this. A website can cost in the thousands to millions to build, depending on a number of factors:
- Is this website being built from scratch with proprietary software?
- Is the website being built based on an existing CMS platform and code tweaked/customized? An example of an open source platform is Drupal.
- Has a team been hired just for this project?
- Is this project being done by a vendor?
- Have you or the vendor done a project such as this before?
To me, for a small to medium sized business the perfect website is based on existing tools and platforms but edited and tweaked to have:
- A unique look
- Unique content
- Necessary branding
- Updated content
This way, the Website will be affordable, in the thousands of dollars and not hundreds of thousands. The website should also be built on a platform where sitewide rollouts and navigation updates are easy and possible. The website can hopefully be updated by anyone with a login. And, of course the website should be built so that online marketing / SEO elements and keyword strategy can be worked throughout.
For larger businesses, this website style can still work well plus scale. Or, a large website can be built from scratch. If you have questions, let me know as I’ve dealt with hundreds of types of top performing websites, from thousands to millions of pages.
