Saturday, June 13, 2009

RATEPOINT for more than just an email campaign



RatePoint’s easy-to-use, web-based solution provides small businesses with the tools to easily collect, manage and promote consumer reviews and feedback directly on their website.

The powerful solution include e-mail marketing and survey tools, plus a web-based dashboard, making it easy for businesses to connect with customers, build customer loyalty to improve consumer confidence and increase sales. Stay in contact with customers and encourage repeat business through incredible email campaigns and follow-up emails.

SIGN UP TODAY! for only $17.95 a month or $149.95 a year.

Select from hundreds of templates to quickly build and send great looking surveys, e-mail newsletters, promotions and requests for reviews.

RatePoint verifies all reviews to ensure that the feedback is real, and provides businesses with the opportunity to respond to unsatisfied customers or negative feedback before it’s posted online.

Manage all your reviews and feedback through your web console With a single click, publish reviews and promote your business featuring reviews on your website.

Develop a built-in testimonials section on your website and create a positive online reputation. See our own testamonials page.

Improve consumer confidence and trust. Strengthen customer relationships. Manage your business reputation.

It's easy with RatePoint.

http://awebstore.com/ratepoint-signup.html

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Ken Freeman is owner of AWS Creative Solutions, a professional web development, hosting and social media marketing organization. When you need a web site professionally developed or maintained, contact the pros at AWS Creative Solutions

Follow me on Twitter.com/AWSCreative





Friday, February 13, 2009

Social Media Strategy

Orchestrate and Optimize for Maximum Impact

For Social Media to be strategic, there must be an integrated marketing plan in place that guides our efforts in Social Media so that time and money is not wasted.

Here are the facets of our Social Media Campaign services  to ensure your business gets the optimum benefits:

Social Media Activation
A Social Media Campaign (SMC) begins with choosing the strategic network of target distribution and delivery points that become your network infrastructure of social media solutions working together for your successful Internet presence.

No two solutions are the same because each one must target your ideal customer. Your business, your customers, your B2B network, your vendors, your public. We research and set your social media to be received by the most promising audiences.

Each audience influences the tools and resources to be selected to become your targeted social media network. The role of your Social Media Specialist (SMS) will be to analyze your business to strategically determine the best tools to support your SMC.

Social Media Orchestration

Someone must be the conductor of your social media orchestra – guiding it according to an integrated strategy. Think of your Social Media Campaign as an orchestra of different instruments:Blogs,
  • Web 2 friend-building sites,
  • Micro blogs,
  • Distributors and syndicators
Like a brass, wind and percussion section of an orchestra, your social media campaign will require management of a number of different “players” in your social media campaign (SMC). Your Social Media Specialist will be the conductor knows how to perfectly synchronize each player to produce the best-finished results.


Social Media Optimization

Your verbiage is the core content people will read and searches will find. Thus, to optimize your verbiage for the best-finished results your SMS will skillfully use your verbiage to insure rich use of keywords
 and hyperlinks back to your main web site.

All keywords are not of equal value to you and your Social Media Specialist needs to focus first on the primary ones to have the largest effect.

Social Media Optimization is about taking advantage of the “share-ability” inherently built into Social Media networks to get your business products, services and brand “out there” for maximum effect. AWS Creative Solutions  Social Media Specialist (SMS) will establish trackback, ping, permalinks and other RSS feeds to insure maximum portability of every post.
Search Engine Placement

Armed with your rich, hyperlinked copy posted to your blog, backed by the full distribution through the blog-world, will insure higher ranking positioning on search results in Google and Yahoo. Our strategic Pay Per Click services (PPC) will further improve your business' visibility and marketing ROI.
Social Media Positioning

Strategic timing and ad positioning in specific target markets with high local impact will insure your investment in a coordinated social media campaign will result in measurable results.

AWS Creative Solutions strategic Social Media and Blogging is your long-term key to focused marketing domination.


Contact Us to start your firm on the road to results. Ken Freeman, senior web consultant to businesses and non-profits is available to answer your questions. support@awebtore.com

Friday, December 19, 2008

SIX C's OF MARKETING

The Six Cs of Marketing

Traditional marketing courses tell about the "Four P's" of marketing: Product, Place, Price and Promotion. As a seasoned Dallas Marketing and Advertising Agency professional, I am here to share about the Promotion element through the Six C's.

(1) CUSTOMER

Today, your company's marketing strategy needs to be customer-focused. It is all about service the customer. We believe that value only exists when we deliver measurable benefit to our customers.

To benefit the customer, first we have to understand your values, wants, needs and motivations. Not "understand" them as demographics or psychographics, but rather understand them as real people.

We have to understand why customers do what they do (or don't do) when they do it. Such knowledge is vital in marketing since having a strong understanding of buyer behavior will shed light on what is important to the customer. We focus on the your target customer first and then reverse engineer the most effective branding strategies.

It is crazy for a business to think they can attract prospects without understanding them. It's vital that companies have mindshare before market share can be gained.

(2) CONSISTENCY

Companies need to maintain consistency in their message; a practice called integrated marketing communications - from packaging and advertising to sales promotion and publicity. This will maintain and reinforce a brand's personality and image in a real life contex.

(3) CREATIVITY

Creativity is imperative to attract the right attention in a world cluttered with thousands of messages. Creativity adds impact through imagination - making your message memorable, compelling and effective.

Creativity lays aside the overly-familiar rules, and embraces out-of-box thinking so that marketers can reach beyond logic and structure and attract using a much more powerful force -- imagination.

* Creativity Informs: Marketing's responsibility to inform is amplified via creativity. Creativity makes marketing more vivid, and many researchers believe vividness attracts attention, maintains interest, and stimulates consumers' thinking.

* Creativity Persuades: Today's marketers are making creative storytelling aids: new myths, heroes and symbols like Ronald McDonald, the "Can You Hear Me Now" guy from Verizon, and more recently the Gecko from Geico Insurance.

* Creativity Reminds: It reinforces the brand with a unique flair. Imagine using the same invitation, without any creativity, to remind people to try a particular product everyday for a month. The invitation would become stale very quickly. Only creativity can transform boring reminders into interesting, entertaining marketing communications.

Nike is proof. Several commercials in a Nike campaign never mention the company name or even spelled it out on the screen. Each communication told a story. Each story evoked an emotion, created a possibility and an opportunity. And, the only on-screen cue identifying the sponsor was a single "swoosh" logo inscribed on the final branding scene.

(3) CULTURE

We understand that your business has to speak the CUSTOMER'S language to reach them in their world. All marketing communications needs cross-cultural research to be able to succeed. It's foolish to only see things from your own perspective, assuming that everyone else in the world thinks exactly like you and should understand what's so great about your product or service.

As David Ogilvy, the Father of Advertising, states, "If you are trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language in which they think".

(4) COMMUNICATION

Consumers don't want to be "sold to". Rather, they want to be "communicated with." Communication ties right into the tips about Culture above.

Good marketing communication creates value with target customers, speaks in their language and tells your story. It's about building long term, trustworthy, and profitable relationships with your customers.

Communication is not persuasive if it is "salesy", rather real communication is authentic and authenticity fosters trust and opens the doors for agreement.

(5) CHANGE

Marketing is not just a business function, but a process. There is a beginning, middle, but there is never an end. Successful must constantly CHANGE as society changes. It is a conversation with your customers and potential customers that evolves right alongside them. As their needs, goals and desires change, our marketing keeps pace.

Marketing needs to be an evolving process that considers change in the world, economy, market, consumers; as well as internal change within the organization.

AWS Creative Solutions' advertising and marketing solutions for growing companies begins with targeted, measurable marketing plans and implement with break-through creative and the most up-to-date and innovative marketing communications. Our award-winning design and broadcast team is able to provide the marketing expertise, media planning, and production for any campaign.

Our clients tell us that our proven ability to deliver elegant solutions for success in a complex world is your answer to more profit in 2009.

Let the results begin by contacting AWS Creative Solutions: 214-703-0505.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Ranking is 'dead' Video/blogging is In for 2009


At PubCon, Bruce Clay, Inc. President Bruce Clay presented at a session entitled "Top-Shelf Organic SEO" in which he discussed the approaching future of SEO as search engines evolve into more modern ranking methods through more personalized search results.

Behavior Based Search

Bruce says that everybody who does a search will end up with different search results based on their prior search history. Personalization is going to be "web-wide" using third party cookies and things.

He provided a specific example of a search for "java". Some are looking for programming, some are looking for the beverage, and some are looking for travel information. Theoretically, personal search will know that and provide results accordingly.

Intent-based Search

Google has been looking up your IP and revising results based on IP. They know where you're located and can make assumptions about the intent of your search. As you get more into intent-based search, it's going to change the way pages rank, Bruce explains. "The page that ranks for a shopping query is an entirely different architecture than the page that ranks for a research query."

Where Does this Leave the SEO Crowd?

"Ranking is dead," says Bruce, recalling his words from his presentation. Going forward, he says you're going to have to look at analytics, measure traffic, bounce rates, action, etc.

Bruce thinks that in the first six months of 2009, we're going to see a lot more implementation of behavior and intent-based search leading to a mindset of "ranking is dead, and traffic is all that matters."

Universal Search

Bruce ClayBruce says this will be the most significant factor of 2009. Google looks at soundtracks and convert them to text. They can jump into the middle of videos, scan sites to determine if you have video/images or not.

If you don't have video and your competition does, Bruce thinks we're going to see a big shift in rankings. He thinks if the top ten sites don't have video, they may lose their ranking over night.


SEE THE FULL STORY ON
WEBPRONEWS.COM

Need help integrating video and blogging so that your site takes on the new characteristics critical for Universal Search. contact 214-703-0505 or visit www.awebstore.com for more info.

About our scope of services





Let us prove our quality, design and team solution to you.
www.AwebStore.com


My Zimbio

Welcome to AWS Creative Solutions

I hope this short video will answer many of your key questions about our site-makeover services.



GET THE FREE REPORT I MENTIONED

Remember, if you need help planning, executing or maintaining your next web project, allow us the opportunity to provide a free project analysis quote. It won't cost you a penny, but it will insure you have our input and advice before investing in your next Internet project.

www.awebstore.com

My Zimbio

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Service Update: Sept.23, 2008

Dear web clients:

1) LOGS HAVE BEEN PURGED:

To make room for more client files, we have purged the server of old stats and logs not used on websites that have more than 2 years use on our server.

Your stats are found in your CPANEL. All stats are set to provide 1 year of stats archive.
If you wish to back up your stats at the end of the year, be sure to log in and archive your older stats.

2) NEW TOOLS:
Watch for the announcement of our newest addition: a new professional CMS solution that allows FREE small 3 page websites ideal for landing pages key product pages. The tools allow you to self-create, edit your site or use their professional templates to quick-start your website. Watch as we add SPEAKLIGHT.
The LightCMS is a content management system for web designers and ad agencies. Design sites, upload them to our content management system,and deploy world-class websites your clients can manage themselves.

3) NEW SOLUTION COMING FOR ENTERPRISE TRACKING OF RESULTS
Infomatica is a robust Saas solution for businesses and non-profits to help them manage more accurately the source and results of websites equipped with Infomatica's browser plugin.

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QUESTION FOR ALL WEB OWNERS:
How is your site working for you?

Do you have any updates or changes needed?

Is your site "old?" The same site that it has been for years? You will be better off to add a blog to your website to increase traffic to your site.

Do you know anyone of your peers,suppliers, or customers that need a professional website created, edited, hosted, or redesigned? Please have them contact 214-703-0505 or visit our www.NeedASiteMakeover.com for our free report.

Ken Freeman



My Zimbio