Our graphic design team finished the Character Design that Evan Carmichael requested. Evan is an entrepreneur & an international business speaker. He may be most known for his interviews with famous entrepreneurs & small business experts.
An internet marketing consultant from our company is a forum moderator on EvanCarMicheal.com and was asked if WebBizIdeas could help him with annual blog review. This year Evan is publishing the top 50 social entrepreneurship blogs!
Anush, our lead graphic designer took images of Jill Fehrenbacher, Tom Zeller Jr., and Ethan Zuckerman and made them each into cartoons “hugging the earth.”
Thanks Evan for letting us be a part of your social awareness project!
Keeping organized is a major component of promotional marketing. When you’re dealing with thousands of bloggers, figuring out who wrote what, when to send out a product, and how you should rate your bloggers is critical. We developed a control panel that shows all the stats necessary in a simple to follow format.
Promoters Control Panel: Overview of Promotions
When logging into tomoson.com you will first be able to see an overview of your promotions and what’s happening with them. This birds eye view tells everything from how many promotions you have to what products you need to ship out. Each of the promotions on the overview page will have links going directly to the stat or information details. The best part of the overview is you can see the total POTENTIAL traffic, twitter followers, and facebook friends who are part of your promotional network.
WIREFRAME OF PROMOTION OVERVIEW CONTROL PANEL
Promoters Control Panel: Blogger Stats
As a promoter you want to know what each of the bloggers are doing for each promotion. The blogger stats page will show who is writing reviews, if you need to enter a tracking number on a product shipped, and the traffic each blogger has. After each blogger writes a review you can view each review, see the amount of keywords written in the review, and if the blogger created any links tracing back to your website.
Shipping products is also easy with the control panel. From the blogger stats page you can mass upload tracking numbers using an excel csv file. This way you can manage large numbers of products being shipped daily. The system can also export blogger shipping information into the same easy to manage csv file. This can be uploaded to any shipping module like stamps.com for quick shipments.
WIREFRAME BLOGGER STATS
Blogger Control Panel: Overview of Promotions
Bloggers can also see what’s going on with the promotions they’ve applied to. An easy to view display will show if they’ve completed all the steps to apply for a product and when they need to review a product. When a promoter ships a product the blogger he/she gets notified and can log back into the system to see the tracking number. Once the review is written the blogger can verify the review on the system with a few clicks.
WIREFRAME BLOGGER CONTROL PANEL
Next week we will be reviewing the custom message center which allows promoters to answers multiple blogger questions with one message.
What is WSOIS.COM? World Series of Intramural Sports will be a social networking web design for people interested in intramural sports. Many people are looking to join, start, or get involved in a non-professional sports team. Not only will WSOIS allow people to get involved with intramural sports, it will also provide an avenue for intramural sport teams to promote.
A website designed to bring together people who play Intramural Sports. Many people do not have the time or talent to play on High School, College, Minor, or Professional sport teams but still have the desire to play sports. WSOIS.com plans on building a community around teams, players, and sporting events.
This business can start out online, but can very easily be expanded offline. Hosting events, tournaments, and the ‘World Series of Intramural Sports’ would be the long term goal.
Main Sections:
PLAYERS: People looking to join an Intramural Sports Team
CAPTAIN: People looking to start, manage, and promote an Intramural Sports Team
OWNER: The owner would control it all
Website Community Features
Find an Intramural Sports Team
Start an Intramural Sports Team
Promote an Intramural Sports Team
WSOIP Championship
Find an Intramural Sports Team: Most people will come onto WSOIS to find local intramural sport teams they can join. There will be a search feature for users to search for local teams by city, state, county, and by sport. The owner can choose any sports to include but some might include: basketball, flag football, soccer, softball, volleyball, golf, tennis, racket ball, and kickball.
Start an intramural sports team: There is usually one captain of an intramural sports team that originally starts a team. This person will sign up as a ‘captain’ and be able to create, manage, and promote their intramural sports team at WSOIS.com. Every captain will be able to build their own team web page.
Any player the captain allows will be to sign up from this web page. The captain will control who can sign up and will be able to manage his entire team on WSOIS. The players that sign up will be able to create a player profile with in the captain’s web page. Both the captain & players will be able to communicate with one another, check the team’s roster, and many other features.
Promote an Intramural Sports Team: The main reason why social networking websites are so popular is because they promote themselves. If you empower your members (captains) to promote their sports team (which is really a section on WSOIS) the marketing of your website will be easier. This section would also allow members to Download Intramural Rule Sheets, Download Educational Materials, Download Forms.
WSOIP Championship: It should be the goal of this website to bring your online community offline. Hosting the World Series of Intramural Sports will simple add to the branding of your business and create a loyal customer base.
Competition
We really don’t see any competitors, rather other organizations that you can partner with. There are other ‘Intramural Sports’ organization, but mainly through universities. Intramural sports are huge on campuses and colleges support them greatly. Your website would give these intramural sport teams an ONLINE HOME.
It is our recommendation that you keep your site free and make money in other places such as advertising due to your target market. It would be the goal of the site to expand past college because local communities also offer intramural sports; they call it recreational; sports. Almost all communities have organization that offer recreation sports but NO ONE KNOWS OF THEM.
So, we view your ‘competition’ as your target market. You are not trying to compete with these organization, you are trying to provide a market for these sport teams in the organizations to have their own Intramural Sport Team’s website.
I while back I saw a PBS special on the something called the “World Wide Mind.” The premise of the “World Wide Mind” is to be able to connect to the internet with your mind. PBS interviewed a scientists Dr. Phil Kennedy, Ramez Naam, Steve Mann, and Dr Rodolfo llinas. Dr. Rodolfo Llinas who with the help of his students have created a prototype of wires small enough to swim up your blood stream, into tiny blood pockets in your brain, and in a sense “wire” your brain.
The OBS study went farther and explained what one could accomplish if they were connected to the Word Wide Mind. If they needed directions to the store they would not find a map, they would not ask directions, they would not find a computer, they would just think it, and they would find the answer “online” (i.e. in their mind.
Crazy. Interesting. hopeful. – however you view the theory Dr. Rodolfo Llinas has, you still have a thought on it; correct? Do you think it is possible? Do you think it could happen in 10, 20, 100 years? Aren’t you a little excited to learn more about it or atleast watch the PBS special?
The point I am trying to make is that whether you think it is possible or not it is an interesting subject. I believe it is possible, I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on it, I would love to learn more about it, I would love to follow Dr. Rodolfo Llinas studies.
Other people may think it is a ridiculous theory, it could never be done, the government would never allow it, there are too many security risks, and no one would agree to wiring their brain. The more publicity Dr. Rodolfo Llinas gets the more people will to voice their opinion if they disagree.
What someone should do is start by creating a basic forum about the world wide mind. You can use Vbulletin for this, buy a custom skin, and have a web design & development company install it. You would need to research the subject and create all the categories but that could be done in a day. Then you would just allow people to come on your forum and discuss the world wide mind.
Marketing:
No one will come to your forum unless your promote it. The easiest way to do this would be to hire a professional writer to research the subject (or write it yourself) and post massive amount of articles, research, opinions, etc… on your site.
The goal would to become #1 for the keyword “world wide mind” in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all other major search engines. Granted many people may not search for that but the ones who do will love your site. As Dr. Rodolfo Llinas gets more press about this more people will be searching and guess who will benefit, you!
This is a long term investment (very low start up) that could pay off huge. Something as big as a “new internet” would be worth throwing up a forum and seeing what happens. Worst case scenario the world wide mind folds and you lose your investment. But if anything does happen you will have the greatest opportunity to act upon it, you will ready be #1 in the search engines for it.
GlenboorkLumber.com was a client who had an outdated website and was in need of a revamped content management system that would be easy to update as well as search engine friendly. After consulting with the client to learn more about the kinds of services that they provided, we were able to figure out the best way to display their services by altering their corporate web design.
When altering the corporate web design for this Minnesota lumber yard, we stuck with the client’s original colors of red, white and blue. We then determined what the main aspects of their business were and made sure that these various aspects were displayed prominently on the site. These business aspects included the following: multiple locations, calls to action, products and services, and establishing company credibility. In order to display their locations, we put the information for the locations in the header of the page. Next, we created easy to navigate dropdown menus so that potential customers would be able to view all of their products and services. Finally, we created a news section in order to display upcoming events. To ensure our web design met the clients expectations we first built a web prototype.
The previous corporate web design of this particular client was old and outdated and failed to show the client’s size and reputation in the lumber industry. Additionally, the old design was not user-friendly and resulted in visitors to the site being confused about what the client had to offer. For this, and other reasons, we had to make sure that the new corporate web design captured the client’s vision. In order to accomplish this, we planned out the website prior to building it. Working with the client’s sales manager, we made sure that we had an understanding of all of the client’s products and services as well as what they wanted to say on the website. Afterwards, our website architect was able to successfully plan out the flow of the new and improved website within a wireframe.
This community website will be the ‘Ultimate Gambling Source.’ There are many people that gamble and many people that claim to be gambling experts, Bet3k.com aims to build a market that brings the two together. The website will not be a gambling website, but a community website for both sports handicappers & for those looking for sports betting advice.
Main Sections:
USER: They will come to Bet3k.com to get sports betting advice MEMBER: They will come to Bet3k.com to give sports betting advice OWNER: = The owner will be able to control it all
The reason why sports handicappers (members) are going to join this site is because they want to promote their own sports handicapping services. They are going to come to Bet3k.com, register for an account, create their business profile, and give sports advice to USERS.
Member’s Community Features:
1. Free Sport Picks:
2. Premium Sport Picks
3. Handicapping Contest
4. Handicapping Records
5. Daily Fan Poll
Free Sport Picks: Members will be able to click on this section and post free sport picks. Each sport pick they create will be a new page & these pages will be able to be searched / browsed by users. Eventually Bet3k.com will promote itself as more members post daily sport picks; expanding the website with natural targeted content for the search engines.
Premium Sport Picks: Members will use this section to promote their own handicapping services. They will post their free sport picks to show people that they can pick winners which will encourage people to sign up for their ‘paying’ handicapping services. Most handicappers in the industry offer ‘pay-by-game,’ weekly, monthly, and yearly picks.
Handicapping Contest: Members will be able to enter in free & paying season long sport handicapping contests. Contest will encourage ‘branding’ of Bet3k.com since handicappers need to enter in their contest picks daily or weekly on the site. It can also be very profitable; we suggest keeping the price of the buy in around $250 -$350 and limit it to 200-300 handicappers per sport/team.
Handicapping Records: The only way for users to decide which handicappers are good and which are bad is to display detailed records. Users will be able to browse & search handicapper’s free sport picks, premium sport picks, and contest picks to make an educated decision on who to trust.
Daily Fan Poll: Users will be able to participate in picking sporting events here. We find that users like to see how they match up to handicappers so this is where they can do that.
Competition:
If you are familiar with the sports handicapping industry you know there is not a strong presence of sports handicappers online. There is a large demand for sports advice, but you will find a limited number of website that truly offers FREE SPORTS ADVICE. The one site we found is: www.Free-Sports-Picks.com
The other competition is individual / company owned sports handicapping sites. Usually the best handicappers join together to offer multiple points of views (that is what people want we found). That is the reason why we want to build an entire online community for all sports handicappers to use. The best group sports handicapping site we found is: http://www.sportsinfo.com/
So we aim to do with Bet3k.com is allow any sports handicapper to own their own site (with in Bet3k.com) similar to sportsinvestmentgroup.com but display / track their results similar to how Free-Sports-Picks.com does.
Bet3k.com will look / work entirely different then both of these sites above – we just wanted to give readers a better visual for Bet3k.com. WebBizIdeas.com actually has 95% of the Bet3k.com outlined and knows a little bit about the online gambling industry since we used to design casino / poker / sportbook websites.
Extra Add Ons
An extremely profitable add on to this website would be fantasy sports betting software. The best part about Bet3k.com (if you do it right) is that there will never be ANY gambling links on the site. If you are a smart marketer you will find a way to brand the business to consumers and make ‘gambling’ a free sport; just like fantasy sports.
Just like fantasy sports, you could be the leader in fantasy sports betting. Depositing money to online casinos with credit cards is now illegal in the United States currently. WebBizIdeas.com has the resources (since we used to create sports betting sites) to build fantasy sports betting software that could be used in Bet3k.com.
The fantasy sports betting software would work the same way regular sports betting does, except the money would be replaced by points & prizes. The only other site online is www.NBX.com which did a decent job with their software. This software is optional and can be added on at anytime.
Why this business will be EXTREMELY PROFITABLE:
I don’t need to explain to you that the U.S Gambling Industry was a $100 billion dollar industry and millions upon millions of people used to and still do gamble online. But my point I want to get across is that there is a LARGE DEMAND for online gambling and NO LEGAL SUPPLY in the U.S.A.
Build this online gambling community and gain control of the online gambling market in the USA. Right now it is illegal for U.S citizens to deposit money in online gambling businesses. Instead of fighting the system, build a business that allows consumers to ‘gamble’ legally.
There are well over 50,000,000 million people that used to gamble online in the U.S.A. that can not anymore. If you convinced 1% of that market to sign up for a $20 a month membership at your website you would be a millionaire in a month!
Future of this business:
I do not know the future of online gambling; no one does. I do know the U.S government would love to receive a piece of the $100 billion dollar gambling industry. My opinion is they will eventually regulate the industry and eventually if businesses follow the rules legalize it; just like they do for brick & motor gambling facilities.
Right now millions of U.S citizens would love to bet on sports – build this social networking site, add on the fantasy gambling application, and gain the gambling market share.
This brief is to inform Online Retailers & Web Development Teams of the increasing importance of online product reviews. With the rise of social media we need to exhort product reviews from social shopping sites to continue to increase conversion rates for our customers.
How Google Is Changing How Product Reviews Are Displayed:
For websites they trust & coded correctly they are listing product reviews in organic search engine rankings. For example, if you type in drooling bar into Google, Drooling Dog’s yelp profile page appears with reviews:
Google Product Search (Google Shopping) has also began to crawl other comparison shopping sites such as BizRate & Shopzilla, Epinions & Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, and ResellerRatings. Product reviews from these trusted sites are showing up in Google Shopping Results:
Why Is This Important For Online Retailers?
Social product reviews (i.e. from customers) are even more important than ever. A product review listed on Shopzilla now appears in Google’s Shopping Results! A review of a company on Yelp now appears in Google’s Organic Search Engine Results!
Companies spend millions of dollars to make more money online. Fortunately for them, have their web design team install product review rich snippets and effectively manage their data feeds can push their company well ahead of their competitors with minimal investment.
Comparison Shopping Review Software: Every comparison shopping site is different. Shopping.com allows you to Integrate Their Product Review Software into your online retail store. So, instead of having internal product review software you use Shopping.com. Everytime someone reviews your product it updates on Shopping.com & epinions.com. This means your reviews also show up in Google’s Shopping Results since Google’s spiders their reviews!
Amazon Marketplace: Amazon.com reviews show up in Google’s Shopping Results. Amazon.com also advertisers their products in Comparison Shopping sites, google ppc, and everywhere imaginable online. This means if you are listed on Amazon.com you allow Amazon.com to create the reviews for you. Especially if you are the low cost leader, everytime someone reviews a product on Amazon.com your chances of selling that product greatly increases.
The Old Fashion Way: Hammer it home user great customer service. After a customer orders & has received the product send an email or give them a phone call. Technology is advanced, have your web guys develop a software application that sends an automatic email 7 days after a product is shipped is not out of the question. A simple follow up asking if they received the product and if they could review the product on your site if they liked it is a very cost effective way to increase product reviews.
Besides selling more products by getting bloggers to write reviews on them, you can increase your search engine ranking from the links created during the review process. As many of you know building links coming back to your website helps increase your websites search engine ranking.
When you send a product to the approved blogger they will write a review and most likely add a link in that review going back to your website. This one-way link is a huge benefit to your websites search engine goals. Most of the time Google gives bloggers higher search engine rankings because they are updating content regularly. Your review will be one of those pages that are weighed heavily, talking about your product, and linking back to your website. These are the three major components to any link building campaign.
How Do I Tell What Links Were Added In A Review?
The power of Tomoson is its reporting features. After a blogger writes a review they need to verify it with a simple piece of code they copy into the review. This piece of code serves two purposes:
1. It will display an icon stating this is a review the blogger got a free product for (Which is now required by law for all bloggers to do)
2. It will capture the review so we can display it in your Tomoson.com control panel.
The second purpose gives you, the promoter all the power to review what was written, how many links are in the review, and where they link. This makes Tomoson.com not only a powerful sales tool but a powerful SEO tool as well.
Next week we’ll review the tomoson.com Control Panel.
Discountinvestmentadvisor.com is a membership based discount investment advisor website that allows its members to sign up, take a questionnaire and be placed into a suggested stock portfolio. Members who join the web site pay a fee to be on the website and, as a result, are allowed access to update information regarding suggestions as to what stocks they should invest in. Owners of this web site have full control over adding, editing, or removing stock portfolio information at any time.
The issue with this particular client’s web site was that even though it was membership based, we needed to create a CMS backend in order to allow the owners to have text editing capabilities. We changed the corporate web design to allow the owners to add images, change meta tags for search engines and change content without needing to know any coding language or html.
Because the client needed a number of customizations to the drupal platform, we decided to plan out the corporate web design before coding it. We consulted with the client who then worked with our architecture consultants to understand the client’s vision. After it was approved, a prototype was subsequently developed and sent over to our graphics team and coders for final implementation.
As a part of the corporate web design, there was also a section for portfolio management where each client takes a questionnaire which is then placed into a recommended portfolio based on conservative to aggressive. As a result, the client needed a system to make it easy for them to calculate both year and earning percentage in order to better control the portfolios. We created a portfolio management system that would allow each administrator the ability to update information instantly, thereby making it easier to manage their portfolios. We also produced a questionnaire creator that would give administrators the ability to change questions and the value of each answer, thereby manipulating the questionnaire to fit any portfolio that they wanted.
Every business wants to rank well in the search engines. But, if your business services a local market, local search engine optimization is crucial to online growth. Local results have been showing up in Google, Yahoo, and Bing in organic search engine results for well over 2 years.
Many companies such as Google, Yahoo, Yelp, CitySearch, JudysBook, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Better Business Bureau, Chamber Of Commerce, YellowBook, SuperPages, Dex, and more promise to help local businesses obtain new customers. For the most part, all of the sites listed can help companies achieve that goal. But one question always arises, what websites should I spend time & money promoting my business on now?
The simple answer is to register for free accounts on all of them. Then, the next answer is to focus on getting in Google’s Top 10 Local Pack because this listing will drive the most amount of free organic search engine traffic.
But is register on all local search engine directories, internet yellow pages, and local review sites enough to rank well organically in Google? Do companies need to know anything before they start registering on 30+ sites? And better yet, should multiple accounts contain consistent information?
Gib Olander from Localeze spoke at an event on “Local Search” and informed listeners that he recommends a consistent Company Name, Company Address, and Company Phone Number when creating company profiles online. Considering Localeze is responsible for provider the data that appear on Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, Best of the Web Local, OpenList, DexKnows, Addresses.com, Citysquares, GenieKnows.com, YellowBot (reference: http://getlisted.org/resources/local-search-data-providers.aspx) it may be wise to take a closer look at why he recommended business owners to do that.
Why a Consistent NAP?
can Google keep track of how many times your company is listed if you are not consistent with your company name? If you are trying to rank well for the keyword “Minneapolis Divorce Lawyer,” but enter “Anderson’s & Sons Minneapolis Divorce Lawyer” into Google’s Company/Organization field, you are telling Google to look for references to “Anderson’s & Sons Minneapolis Divorce Lawyer” online.
Is your company listed everywhere online as “Anderson’s & Sons Minneapolis Divorce Lawyer?” Or is your company name clearly published on your website as “Anderson’s & Sons Law Firm.” When you registered on Yelp, Twitter, CitySearch, Facebook, etc… what company name do you use?
Local search engines look for references & citations of your company when determining your local search engine placements. If your company does not have a consistent NAP, your rankings will be poor.
