Holiday Cards

Sending a holiday card is an easy and inexpensive way of showing those who live near and far that you’re thinking about them during the holiday season. You could throw a few boxes of store bought cards in your basket the next time you’re out shopping, but why not make your own holiday cards? You can create some truly festive holiday cards using cardstock, glue, felt, and yarn. If your kids are old enough, let them assist with the process.

Cut your cardstock to a size that will fit into a standard size envelope and then create your felt stencils using some additional (or scrap pieces) of cardstock. Your stencils can be any shape you desire, but trees and ornaments are probably going to be the easiest for mass production. After cutting out all the adornments for your cards, glue them onto the front of your cards. Using yarn, tie small bows and cut short pieces of ribbon to represent the hooks from which the ornaments hang. If you’re creating trees, use glitter pens to dab on some sparkly ornaments.

Once your cards have completely dried, write a holiday message for the intended recipient. Don’t worry; your greeting doesn’t have to be something you’d find in a store-bought card. A thoughtful note will be enough to show the recipient that you care about them – and they’ll be wowed by the crafty card you’ve sent their way.

If you need more inspiration, here are some other DIY card ideas.

Gift Baskets

When it comes to mailing holiday gifts or sending out corporate gifts, people often resort to sending the traditional chocolate boxes. Why not send them something a little out of the ordinary? Instead of sending only sweets, consider sending a teddy bear gift basket from The Serious Teddy Bear Company. They have a variety of bears for all sorts of holidays, but they also feature a holiday gift bear basket that comes with Hershey’s kisses, gourmet jellybeans, chocolate cookies, and a soft teddy bear.

If you think your recipient won’t be wooed with a teddy bear basket, consider signing them up to receive gift baskets each month. Birchbox will send your recipient a box of beauty products to sample each month, and OliveBox will send a package of handmade paper craft items, including note cards and artwork.

Christmas Morning Breakfast

You might have fond memories of waking up Christmas morning to a mound of presents and later enjoying a hot breakfast that Mom made. While these warm and fuzzy memories were great for you, chances are good Mom would have liked someone serving her breakfast. Instead making your holiday breakfast on Christmas morning, create a breakfast casserole dish that you can prepare the night before.

If you are looking for a sweet breakfast casserole recipe, try Paula Deen’s baked French toast casserole, complete with gooey maple syrup. If your family isn’t one to overload on sweets early in the morning, consider the savory eggs Portugal, which features sausage, eggs, cheese, and bread. This year, you can pop your breakfast casserole in the oven before you begin opening presents and have a hot meal ready by the time the last gift is unwrapped.

Phone Cases and Protectors – Smartphones are very useful, but they are also fragile beyond belief. Screen protectors can be found at any electronics store to keep the glass from picking up scratches from every day use, but you can help add some style to a phone with a fun phone cover. Check sites like Etsy to find a custom phone cover that matches your loved one’s style.

Gift Cards – Gift cards are some of the most universally panned gifts to give, but they can also provide the most value for the gift recipient. While gift cards may not be a suitable gift under the tree, they are perfect for stocking stuffers. Got a poor college student home for the holidays? Try a gift card to the local grocery store or to Amazon to help buy textbooks online.

Medical Alert Jewelry – These little stocking stuffers are small, but they can have a big impact. While it can sometimes be tough to get loved ones to wear these, companies like Hope Paige offer stylish medical ID bracelets and pendants. These can easily be added to with fun charms to make sure your loved ones with allergies or chronic illnesses can be cared for in an emergency.

Personal Hygiene – It can be easy to forget little hygiene tools like a new toothbrush, razors or nail care kits. Give the gift of hygiene with some small tools that are easy to fit in a stocking.

Watches – Watches can be a difficult gift, since everyone has their own style, so you should look for a watch that can be changed if needed. The Timex Weekender can be found online for as low as $30, and retailers offer a full line of replacement bands in all sorts of colors and styles, so it’s sure to be a hit.

Clothing Accessories – Scarves or ties make a great stocking gift for men or women. It’s a bit of a pain to wrap up a single tie or scarf, but adding it to a stocking is a breeze. Stockings are often reserved for small, silly gifts, but there’s no reason you can’t offer a practical gift alongside some fun stocking stuffers.

Portable Speakers – There are plenty of stand-alone, on-to-go speakers, but many can cost as much as $300. The Supertooth Disco 2 is available in a range of colors, can fit in your pocket with room-filling sound, and it’s only $99.

Fancy Dog Treats – You can’t afford to overlook man’s best friend this holiday season, but most dogs aren’t the gift-unwrapping type. Since it’s the holidays, filling a stocking with fancy natural dog treats can make your dog one festive pup.

Only time will tell how LinkedIn will recover from this, but they are just one of many businesses who have needing major reputation repair to earn consumer trust back. The following are some examples of PR problems and ways the companies recovered from them.

Bad Tweets from a Company’s Official Twitter Account

Social media can be both a blessing and a curse.  It provides a great way for business to engage directly with other brands and their consumers, but it can also present a problem if not handled correctly. Take the example of the Red Cross employee who accidentally sent the following personal tweet from the official Red Cross account: “Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch beer… when we drink we do it right #gettngslizzerd.” Instead of just deleting the post, the Red Cross replied, saying “We’ve deleted the rogue tweet but rest assured the Red Cross is sober and we’ve confiscated the keys.” They didn’t hide behind the mistake but instead acknowledged the mistake and made it humorous. If a social media blunder happens to your company, you can look for other ways to recover from the incident here.

Company-wide Criticism From One Employee’s Actions

In March 2011, CEO Bob Parsons posted a graphic video on his Twitter account that showed him shooting and killing an elephant in Zimbabwe. Animal rights activists were outraged at what they considered a tasteless video glorifying his kill, and PETA started an online boycott of the hosting company’s services. In a CNN interview, Parsons said he killed the elephant for the locals’ benefit as the animals would often crush crops the villages depended on for food. He argued killing the elephant not only protected their crops, but also provided food to local residents, many of who he claims are on the brink of starvation.

Despite the boycott from PETA and the backlash from animal rights activists, Parsons persisted the killing was done for the benefit of the villagers. It’s hard to say whether the appeal worked for animal rights victims, but GoDaddy.com’s spokeswoman said there was no significant change in business after the uproar.

Neighborhood Crimes Splashed Across the News

Local brick and mortar businesses may find themselves in situations that could prove extremely damaging if not handled correctly. One such example is if a graphic crime takes place at a business, especially if the business deals with residential living. For businesses operating at a location where a crime took place, it can be difficult to assure customers that it is safe to come back to your location or safe to continue living at that location. You could even be faced with a landlord’s worst nightmare: a death or homicide in one of your apartments or residential homes. Not only is this situation horrible for the family members and friends of the deceased, but as a property owner, how can you assure future tenants they will be safe?

In the event your property is the scene of a gruesome crime, you’ll want to ensure law enforcement comes to the scene to collect evidence to not only determine who the culprit is, but to also prevent this sort of event from happening in the future. After law enforcement (and probably the media) leaves the scene, you’ll need to call a crime scene cleanup company like Accident Cleaners to fully remediate the property. If you ever intend to occupy the space again, whether by renting out the space or occupying it yourself, you aren’t going to be able to fully clean, deodorize, and sanitize a property to an acceptable standard without hiring professionals.

Tony Mary, a landlord who has worked at several apartments in Orlando, has heard stories from colleagues left to deal with the aftermath of a crime on their properties.

“It’s hard for them to tell their residents or tenants ‘Our property is safe’ when it’s been splashed across the front page of the newspaper with pictures of police and crime scene investigators surrounding a building. It’s not really something they can hide from.”

Unfortunately, this situation is one that ultimately only time can help eliminate from people’s minds. You’ll need to be extra vigilant in the coming months to guarantee as much safety as possible to your tenants and your customers, and you’ll likely need to make additional investments in security. While your name will forever be entangled with the crime, it doesn’t have to be the end of your business. For example, after the gruesome 1990 murders of five Gainesville college students, one apartment complex managed to stay open for 15 more years even though it was the scene of one of the crimes.

Google’s Matt Cutts Warns Against Buying Links (Way Back in 2007)

With Google’s Penguin update, the search engine makes good on Matt Cutts’ 2007 statement that sites that purchase links may be penalized more in the future.

What is an Authority Site?

An authority site is one that has a great deal of content on a particular theme or subject. It does not combine multiple themes and try to connect them together. For example, an authority site is not one that talks about basket weaving, options trading and recipes all at the same time. Instead, an authority site is based on one particular subject and provides some of the best content on that subject. The thing that really sets authority sites apart is the quality of the content that it contains. When someone arrives on an authority site, they do not have to wonder about whether they should believe the information that is presented. Instead, they simply take what it says as truth in most cases.

If you want to create your own authority site, you need to put an emphasis on cranking out quality content. This doesn’t mean that you should try to rewrite a 300-word article that you found on another site. It means that you should create content that is completely unique and captivating. Search engine algorithms are getting smarter and they have ways of determining if your content is good.

Other Factors

Besides having good content, authority sites also have some other things that search engines look for. Obviously they need several quality inbound links to get high in the search engine rankings. At the same time, they also have outbound links that are pointing to other related sites. Some webmasters are scared to put links on their sites because they’re afraid of losing any of their “link juice.” As long as the link is pointing to a relevant site, there is no problem with linking out.

Social Media Help

One of the best ways to promote your authority site is to use social media. Most authority sites now have social media profiles on all of the major networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. By participating in these mediums, you can reach more people and start to develop relationships with your visitors and subscribers. When you have a large network of friends or contacts on these social networks, you can essentially send out free messages about your subject without much trouble. This can also be useful when it comes to promoting a certain product or cause.

Developing Your Site

If you are truly interested in the authority of your site, you need to spend quite a bit of time building it up. This means you have to invest time into creating content or paying someone to create quality content for you. The most important thing that you can do is build content. Build 500 pages or more of content if you have to. Spend some time creating a professional design for your site as well. When someone arrives on a site, they want to see that it has a modern and clean design. Otherwise, they may be less likely to trust the information presented. After some time has gone by and your site continues to grow, the search engines will start to view your site as an authority site.

Jeff Gross writes mostly about blogging, internet marketing, Pay Per Click Strategies and Search Engine Optimization techniques and best practices. He is also a consultant and content contributor for Queens condo community.

While stock photography is an easy method for accessing such imagery, it’s crucial to mix things up so that your work doesn’t wind up being a carbon copy of every other website out there, designed by someone pulling from the same stock sites.

Here are the top dos and don’ts for using stock photography to your advantage.

DON’T use anything you’ve ever seen as a stock photography internet meme. Sure, we’re all fans of such gems as “women laughing while eating salad” and “people kissing computers alone” (note: to be fair, they were lonely and the computers were warm), but their unintentional, awkward hilarity isn’t something that will snag you clients, nor will they keep anyone who is internet savvy on your page. Save the memes for humor sites.

DO experiment with abstract vectors and illustration. While you may or may not be as savvy as a trained graphic artist, you’ve got the design chops to create a compelling symbol out of a library of professional images. Design a theme around the site’s audience or the company’s voice, mission or philosophy.

DON’T use images that have nothing to do with your content. You might like that picture of a beach at sunset, but if a trucking company has hired you, it probably won’t work. Unless, of course, the photo is of a semi driving into the ocean at sunset, in which case go right ahead.

DO use strong and specific imagery that relates to your content. Your client may want you to create a site that invites customers inside with an image of a welcoming smile, but it might not apply to what the client does. This image is better displayed on someone who represents that potential customer or someone who is doing something related to the business rather than on some random, sanitized woman in a business suit.

 DON’T use tired images, even if they relate directly to your content. Most stock photo cliches stem from the business world, like people in suits crossing their arms to appear intimidating, people gathering around a table for the most awkward looking meeting in all of human history, and hands firmly shaking. Houston, we have a deal!

DO use stock footage to increase engagement. Videos are an excellent way to drive the company’s message and voice home while demonstrating likability and expertise. Usability testing has shown that if people are asked to engage in your website via a “play” button, they are more likely to stick around once they have engaged themselves.

DO use different photos across the various sites you design. Stock photography has enough cliches on its own. Don’t create more within your own work.

No matter what routes you take, the key to using stock photography in web design is remembering that you’re a creative professional. Have fun, and shake things up!

One of our clients needed to let his site visitors sift through dozens of apartment complexes according to different search variables. 407apartments.com, which lets users search through apartments in Orlando, needed an easy way to let visitors search apartments according to price, number of bedrooms, amenities, location, ZIP code, and more features.  We created a showcase feature that offers visitors a chance to easily filter through dozen of search results according to several different metrics, in this case, apartment amenities and features.

What It Is

Instead of other apartment locator features that make the user enter in all the parameters before beginning their search, and then limiting the parameters to just floor plans and prices, 407apartments.com displays all the different possibilities for the complexes featured on the site, letting each viewer build custom search results. By giving users options other than just rent range and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, anyone using the site is able to filter apartments according to exactly what features they need for their next residence.

Once users begin selecting the appropriate information, the search results update immediately. Users no longer have to leave the page they are on to see all the results from their apartment search. 407apartments.com also features integrations with Google Maps to pinpoint exactly where each complex is in relation to other parts of the city.

Results are updated immediately as users select more search filters

This showcase feature offers an administrative area that allows site admins to easily add, delete, or edit listings. Each item within the showcase can have its own multipage community where visitors can search for further information without leaving the page. Each community also features an admin area where you can update the content and information as needed, and can feature its own SEO friendly URLs to take people directly to those results.

Each community has multiple pages of information you can include, giving users all the information they need without leaving the page.

How We Do It

We used client side code to display all the search results, offering users a better search experience as results are able to load more quickly than with server side code. Using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming to link the client side and server side code, the server side code filters the database of apartment information and return the results as they apply to the different search filters (lease term, number of bedrooms, pet friendly, etc.). We used Quicksand to change the search results after filters have been  applied, removing certain apartment complexes from the search results and shifting the remaining complexes to fill in the spaces left vacant by eliminated apartment listings.

The showcase feature also integrates with the Google Maps API to display where the apartments are located in relation to each other and areas of town. After entering the apartment complex address into the Google Maps API, the address is geocoded into longitude and latitude positions. Using the Distance From Location filter on the showcase page, once users enter the location from which they are searching, the address is geocoded and passed from AJAX into the database where all the client-supplied apartment information lives. The database uses the haversine formula to determine the closest distance between the two points and displays the results that fit within what the user is searching for.

Although we had a strong root domain, there weren’t any links going back to any of the pages associated with Core’s services. Because it was essentially a new site, we had very poor (even nonexistent) rankings and no links in place. For our main keyword, “small business web design,” when I first started link building, we weren’t showing in the top 80 pages.

Yes, we fell below the first 800 results for our main keyword in Google. Not exactly a situation any business wants to find itself in.

With our $500 a month budget and five to ten hours a month to spend building links for the web design division’s site, 10 months later, we’re on the top of page two for our main keyword and appearing in the top three results for our secondary keyword, “small business web design company.”  We’ve also seen an increase in traffic ranging from 6 to 10 times as many visits as we did prior to starting our marketing efforts.

Wondering how we did it on a small budget and minimal hours invested each month?

For starters, Core’s website had a pretty hefty advantage when I started building links because we already were associated with a well performing domain that was being updated regularly. We were also doing link building for 352media.com, so both of these factors gave us a big leg up over a website starting from scratch.

Over the last ten months, I’ve also been taking a steady approach to link building, adding our site to industry specific directories; writing press releases as needed for company events or milestones; and focusing heavily on guest blog posts for web design and digital marketing sites. In those ten hours each month, I spent an average of one hour writing a press release when needed, three hours directory linking, and the rest of the time writing content to appear on a myriad of digital marketing websites.

Content creation has been a big part of the overall SEO strategy, and there is no shortage of websites looking to add new content to their blogs. Joining a service like Blogger Link Up has given me a huge advantage in finding sources of content, and I’ve found the sources to be incredibly receptive to the articles I’ve written.

The biggest turning point in our rankings rise happened after our design director, Daniel, had three hugely successful blog posts published on Mashable. This, in addition to guest posts I wrote, added a great 1,2 punch to our link building strategy and brought tons of new traffic to our website.

You can see from the image below the increase in traffic we’ve received over the past ten months (the large spikes coming when our guest posts on Mashable went live).

Of course, I can’t take all of the credit for the success we’ve seen as I’ve had our designers contribute blog posts and I’ve had suggestions and input from other members of our marketing team. But, if I was able to increase our rankings from page 80 to page 2 in under a year with less than ten hours a month, imagine the impact this sort of long-term marketing could have on your business.

Important details:

• I am only competing for google Australia. The products will only be sold locally.
• The competition for non-web or finance related keywords is considerably less. In fact after this experience I think future projects will focus on niche’s outside web and finance, which traditionally I have focused on.
• This is part 1 of the case study, getting the home page ranked. When I have achieved success I will write another case study on getting inner pages ranked.

So whilst I have already talked poorly of more accomplishments, its important to note, that these results were achieved with a budget of less than $150 in less than 2 months. Initially, I was going to hire someone for my SEO and had quotes ranging from $750 to $2500 for top 10 results within 6 months (perhaps I should offer SEO services???). Without the expectation of instant success I will be forced to try to remember the individual steps and thier details, and as such the information will not be exact.

My Greatest Mistake

Ever done a big project or assignment and realised you have done all this work on a false premise? I can not stress the importance of getting fundamentals right onine and in life. Its like building a house on sand (ref: Jesus), with incorrect foundations, the house is doomed for failure.

Unfortunately for me you may learn from my mistakes (this happens a lot). The fundamental of SEO is targetting the correct keywords. Ones with traffic, little competition, and an ability to convert. During my keyword research phase, I mistakenly forgot to search using [exact] terms on Adwords suggestion tool. The result being I was using traffic figures for broad terms instead.

If you are unsure what this means I will provide an example. Lets use Dog Food as the keyword. When you use the [exact] search on adwords, google will let you know how many people typed just “dog food” in thier search engine. If you use the [broad] search in adwords, the results will include every single search that included “dog food”. So when someone searches “best dog food”, “good dog food” or something off topic, such as “people eating dog food videos” they are all included in the number of searches.

As you can see, you would get a wildly inflated result which is exactly what happened to me. After picking my major keyword, buying a domain that included the key word, I realised my folly and the search term that the site is now named after is barely used.

The Domain

Despite it being a poorly chosen keyword, I have used it as my domain name. If your site is new, choosing a domain name with the target keywords in there is a great head start. Search engines love keyword rich domain names and its not really a surprise that they do. Webmasters can’t cheat, or lie with a domain name, and its a fairly safe bet that the content will match the domain. Despite my domain keyword phrase being obsolete, the keywords within that phrase are used extensively for my site. I regitered my domain for the longest period possible (5 years) because it gives authority and longevity to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

The Placeholder

The site was still under construction, but I wanted to let the search engines know about the site as soon as possible. I created a simple html page, with a little bit of content including the keywords for the site. I then linked to this placeholder from scribblescratch (a strong PR5) and the site was indexed within 24 hours. Obviously it may be hard for a strong pr5 link to your site, but any established site will do, the link from Scribble Scratch is hardly related, and has no context, so despite being a PR5 it would be pretty worthless for rankings.

The Blog

Knowing the difficulty that ecommerce sites face for rankings I knew I would have to give the site an extra dimension and adding a blog is both easy and crack for search engines. As with new blogs I did the very basic, but neccessary steps in optimizing this new blog. I added sites to ping, fixed up the permalinks, added all in one SEO plugin and created a site map. Then I simply added a few simple blog post per week

Getting Links

Then comes the fun part getting links for your site. Being a busy person, who hates monotonous task, I was always going to buy my links in some fashion. I decided to be cautious I would first optimise the blog (you will find out later my main reason), and also because the blog links back to the main site with my keyword. I used the services section of DP and found a service wehere they would write a post, spin it and publish it on thier network of blogs (over 100 from memory). I think this cost me $30.

I then hired 3 seperate people (all from DP) to do manual directory submissions. They cost roughly $10-$20 each, and had them focused on quality over quantity. I used 3 different people to get a nicer mix of directories then if I had chosen the same person for three different keywords. Two of these pointed directly to the main site, while the other pointed to the blog.

I then purchased an article writer, spinner and submission service. I think it was one article to 50 directories. This service cost me $25. At this stage all of my keywords were ranking, albeit only in the top 100, but just seeing the site in google gave me hope.

After about a week or so, I then purchased a link wheel, profile link service. Basically it was 6,000+ links for $25. Although the links don’t seem to show up in site explorer, within a couple of days my rankings were all in the top 20. Again I found this service through DP, but fiverr or warriorforum are great places to find these types of services. Within a few more days, my keywords were in the top 10.

The site completed

Somewhere around this stage, the website design and installation was completed. Although the on-page SEO factors had changed little (or possibly even got a little worse) the site was actually user-friendly. As I use analytics, I think this plays a part in googles algorithms as google wants to give relevant results. Whats more relevant, a site with a bounce rate of 90% or a site with strong user interaction? With the ecommerce site up, users stayed far longer, visited more pages, and the bounce rate went down to 30%, at the same time my rankings also rose. Coincidence perhaps, but logic suggest otherwise.

Back to Links

Now the reason I optimised the blog earlier on was for the introduction of smart links plugin. Basically it automatically links keyword to any page you chose. (read this for more). Anyway after getting about a dozen posts published I activated the plugin, with my keywords straight to my ecommerce site. I also purchased 2 blog post on fashion blogs (I got them to write, you can save money by writing them yourself) for about $20. I chose blog post over blog links, because they are cheaper, they are more contextual, you can ususally have up to three keyphrases, and most importantly they are permanent.

The Result

I have been trying to rank for four keywords.

First Keyword (most important): Rank #2
Second Keyword (low traffic but high coversions): Rank #1 and #2 (the blog is the number 2 spot)
Third Keyword: Rank # 7
Fourth Keyword: Rank #9

Total Cost:

Blog Network; $30
Directory Submissions: $35
Article Submission: $30
Profile Links/Wheel: $25
Smart Links: Free
Blog Post: $20

Total: $140

Total Time:

The domain was registered on 9th of february and the results achieved on the 4th of April.