We don’t have a hard launch date yet — our awesome clients must come first — but we’ll be sure to let you know when we’re ready to launch.

The internet is certainly a different medium than traditional print advertising — coupons are certainly still an option. And while we think there’s probably better, more creative ways to try and bring people into your store — it’s worth trying it out.

Google places (the website formerly known as Google Local Business Centre) allows you to have coupons available to customers when they search for you on Google Maps.

Contact us if you’d like help getting set up on Google places and making sure people can find you — and your coupons!

This article on Copyblogger talks about 5 reasons your newsletter isn’t getting the response you think it should from your customers. The 5 reasons they give are:

• Your newsletter isn’t helpful
• Your voice isn’t particularly compelling
• You’re not telling stories
• You have a half-hearted call to action
• You don’t have a specific frequency

You’ll have to read the rest of the article to get all the details but something that is important to remember is that these rules don’t just apply to your newsletter. They also apply to your website. Many websites aren’t really helpful, compelling, lack a true story or narrative, have half hearted calls to action and, in the case of many blog based web sites, aren’t updated frequently enough.

Try viewing your website through they eyes of someone who doesn’t know anything about your business. What would they want to find out? What would they expect to find on your site? Try to put aside your own preferences, likes and dislikes and focus on what content should be on your site to help someone want to engage with your business.

You should contact us if you’d like to figure out what the content should be on your website.

Their previous site was working okay for them, they just had new brochures that they wanted their website to match up with for a consistent look throughout their marketing materials as well as convey the history and strong tradition of building great ready to move homes that J&H Homes has for over 40 years.

Old Design:

New Design:

The slogans J&H Homes wanted at the top of the website are not just marketing speak, they are phrases that honestly represent what J&H Homes stands for:

By featuring large, beautiful renderings of the ready to move homes instead of just their names customers are able to, at a glance, see which home they are interested in on the /our_homes page:

One week is too short of a time period to make any serious conclusions about their new website design and layout, but in the week since launching the new design a few interesting things have been happening:

• They’ve seen increases of 20%-40% page views on most pages and as much as a 2,300% page view increase on key home design pages.
• People are signing up for their email newsletter.
• An 18% increase in the average time people spend on their website.

Be sure to contact us if you have any questions about how your website could be improved and help your customers find the information they are looking for AND the information you want them to find. Also, be sure to sub­scribe to our Email Newsletter or RSS feed.

From the feedback we got we’ll definitely be doing another one in the future — be sure to sign up for our newsletter if you’re interested in attending.

On to the resources and links!

Slide Deck

Slides available on slideshare.net

Links and Resources

Here’s a few of the tools and links mentioned in the seminar that you may be interested in:

• http://analytics.blogspot.com — Google’s blog on all things analytics.
• Ego — Analytics tracking app for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad
• http://www.bitly.com — tracking links you post on Twitter/Facebook/etc.
• Dashalytics — Analytics tracking widget for OS X
• Analytics App — for iPhone/iPod touch and for iPad

Photos

Check out flickr for photos from the seminar.

Did we forget anything? Some questions that you didn’t get answered? Send me an email or leave a comment and we’ll do our best to answer your question.

Here’s the results if you search for @yastech.

…designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.

At TEDx events, unique talks given by live speakers combine with TEDTalks videos to spark deep conversation and connections. TEDx events are fully planned and coordinated independently, on a community-by-community basis.

TEDxSaskatoon is coming in October, 2010. Follow along on Twitter for updates or visit the site to sign up and volunteer.

Be sure to contact us if you have any questions about how your business could do a better job of engaging with your customers. And be sure to sub­scribe to our Email Newsletter or RSS feed.

Taking into account that there are four of us in our group doing the same thing daily and cumulatively having the largest following on Twitter and Facebook, the results have been quite shocking and a little disheartening. Calculating the number of votes we get per day, it’s just over 100. Divided between four of us, that is 25 each. And seeing that I’m voting 5x for myself (one on each browser and one on my phone browser) each day, that’s 20 per day! Seeing that I have 31,815 followers on Twitter alone, that’s 0.06% of my followers that are actually voting (and that’s taking into account that people are voting only once!). Not to mention that I also got the infamous Gary Vaynerchuk to ask his 878,000+ followers to vote and my SEO friend, Dean B to sprinkle it through is network…which got us probably a couple dozen votes in total.

Emphasis mine.

While a karaoke contest isn’t exactly the greatest metric for follower support, it does provide an interesting data set to investigate how loyal your followers/fans are on social networks. As we’ve posted about in the past, visitors to our website from Facebook do seem more inclined to spend longer on your site than Twitter followers do but that doesn’t require any actual action step other than to leave a browser window open.

There’s an interesting discussion in the comments section of that post, including one comment from Erica that confirms what we’ve been seeing with our clients:

My largest asset is my email list. With ~4,000 people on it, it outperforms EVERY other method by thousands of times. Second is my blog’s RSS readership–though they don’t buy as much, they tend to engage.

But I can blast out an email to my list and get hundreds of click-throughs and replies in a matter of minutes. Don’t know what it is about email, but it really is effective, and at this point I think any online business without a list is doing itself a disservice.

Be sure to contact us if you have any questions about how your business could do a better job of engaging with your customers, including starting up an email newsletter.

And be sure to subscribe to our Email Newsletter or RSS feed.

One that came out a few months ago that might be a good fit for you is called Teux Deux. It’s a joint development between Swiss-miss.com and Fictivekin.com.

Marketing Speak:

TeuxDeux is a simple, designy, browser-based to-do app… The idea was to build a bare-bones, but visually compelling and highly usable to-do app based on Tina’s personal ideal work-flow.

Positives

It features a simple list for each day of what you have to get done with an easy to use interface for adding or removing to dos. You can also click and drag to reorder items within a day or drag them over to another day if you don’t think you can get it all done that day.

Teux Deux also has a ‘Someday’ list at the bottom of the page where you can put your to-do’s that aren’t urgent and can wait for some free time in the future:

Negatives:

One limitation for a lot of people will be that it’s an online only to do list — so if you’re without an internet connection you can’t add/remove to dos. They are, however, working on an iPhone and Blackberry apps so that should add some ability to have offline access to your list.

Final Verdict:

Teux Deux is a free app (expect a premium version in the future with more features) so you can’t go wrong in at least trying it. It’s clean, simple design will help you focus on your tasks and not distract you with a bunch of chrome and eye candy. Check out Teux Deux for yourself and let us know how it helps you organize your busy life!

You can watch their promo video below for more information:

Direct link to video