When you think “content,” you probably think words: articles, product descriptions, and other written pieces you can include on your site. However, website photos, logos, and other images are just as important to add as articles are. A description of what you do or what products you have is excellent, but a photo can help visually connect a reader to your Northern Colorado business. They can see what to look for when they drive past your office or store, they can see what your product looks like when they find it in a store, and they can even see what your employees look like, so there’s a spark of recognition when they visit you in person.

1. Photos draw attention

Photos will grab your readers’ attention when they check through your site. You don’t necessarily have to spend a fortune on professional photos, but clear photos that are bright and easy to see are going to make more of an impression than blurry or dark photos. Readers will be able to see what you mean when you explain your product, and website photos can actually encourage people to view more of the site or contact you if they like what they see.

2. Photos create a connection to your business

Unless you have a poet writing the copy or articles for your Northern Colorado business website, you will probably sound like a lot of other local companies who are in the same industry. The words are important, but website photos can reiterate what you do, show what your company stands for, and put a face to the business. When people are able to see examples, it helps them draw more of a connection between what you do and who you are.

3. Photos can enrich your website’s SEO

Did you know that you can add SEO details to photos? It’s true. They are not just something pretty for your customers to look at when they visit your site. They can also help people find your site. You can add titles and descriptions to your media, which are both indexed in the search engines. While it isn’t as much content as an entire article, it can still help out when people search for a service or product your company provides. Just make sure you use your own photos and upload them to your site, or else they will link to the place on the web where you originally found them, leading your readers, and the search engines, elsewhere.

Just because your Northern Colorado business isn’t a multi-national corporation with a huge budget doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a little extra time to add some color to your website. You will help your readers understand your business and hold their interest much better if you include photos and images throughout your website than if you just have an all-text website.

However, a word of caution: don’t overload your site with photos! They can make it look cluttered, confusing, and if you have a lot of photos or a number of high resolution photos, it can even slow the website down when a person tries to view it. Disperse your website photos in moderation with your text, and only include photos that are relevant to your company, and you will be well on your way to attracting new customers and keeping current ones interested in following your business.

Email has been around for a while now, and it has come a long way from being a faster way to send a letter to someone. Email can be used to keep a digital address book and contacts, send photos and documents, and even promote your local small business. However, there are many companies that have not yet learned the benefits of how to use it to broaden their customer base.

The benefits of internet email marketing are extensive: you can share news about your company, let people know about sales or events at your business, offer discounts or free incentives to existing and potential customers, and test interest in new products or services with the people who follow your company.

How Does Email Marketing Work?

If you think your business could benefit from marketing strategies via email, you might be wondering: How does internet email marketing work? There are plenty of services out there that can help you manage an email marketing campaign, but don’t let all the options overwhelm you.

A few of the most popular options are:

• Constant Contact
• AWeber
• Mail Chimp

For those who maintain their own websites, these services allow you to implement your email opt-in list yourself. However, if you have a web designer or host that takes care of all of the changes and updates to your site, you can create the opt-in list yourself, and have the service simply send instructions to your web designer to implement the new sign-up box on your website.

You can create new messages to announce an upcoming holiday, sale, event, new product release, or an incentive, or you can set up automated messages, such as tips or helpful information related to your business or product, to be sent out on a regular basis. Either way, you will have a new way to communicate with your customers and get them involved in your business.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a website, don’t worry! You can still take advantage of the benefits of internet email marketing. While you may not have a sign-up box on a website, you can add one to your Facebook page, or you can have a sign-up sheet right in your office or store! Many of these services allow you to add subscribers manually by importing a list or adding individuals one at a time. This will involve a couple extra steps for you, but staying in touch with your customers and growing your business is important, so you may decide that it’s worth the extra time and effort to keep track of your customer base and connect with them on a regular basis.

Using email to market your local small business is not a cure-all. It is simply another excellent online tool you can use to help people learn more about your business and contribute to it for years to come.

With the constant change in social media, it can be difficult to find new ways to expand your audience. Never fear, there is always a way to expand your audience when you network with others who are involved in your area of business.

One tool that may not be a new trend, but is worth take advantage of, is guest blogging for business. Fort Collins businesses can benefit from this opportunity to network with other bloggers which can help you reach that desired audience you’re looking for.

While there has been increasing popularity in blogging, it can be hard to determine if a blogger is a credible and worthy resource to contact. Here are some tips that are important to consider when searching for that perfect blog:

• Look for the blogs that are related to your business. While this may seem like an easy task, research must be conducted in order to make sure that the blog you found is related to your topic. Some blogs might have posts that are similar to what you want to write about, but they don’t have articles that are directly related to what your business sells. Therefore, you may not get the awareness you were hoping to gain through guest blogging for your business.
• Determine if the blogger has a well-established following of readers that will be interested in checking out your website. There may be bloggers that have interesting content and graphics, but there may not be anyone who is reading or commenting on their posts. Look at the blogger’s posts to see if any comments have been posted. Take advantage of website information companies such as Alexa.com that tell you what the blog’s online traffic ranking is. The lower the number, the greater their online presence is.
• Maximize your search by using helpful resources. Websites like Technorati and Google Blog Search are search engines that focus specifically on ranking blogs by popularity and importance. It is also useful to search for local bloggers if you are looking to reach a specific audience instead of a broader market.
• Establish relationships with bloggers. As the saying goes, it’s all about who you know. Having a good relationship with bloggers will give you a better advantage to have your voice heard by their audience. Bloggers will be more willing to work with people that they know and trust. If you are new to the online scene, use resources that can help you get connected with bloggers. You can also contact influencers in your niche and ask them if they would be interested in allowing you to write for them.
• Write an appealing pitch letter. You want to grab the blogger’s attention since they receive numerous requests every day. One great way to attract their attention is to find a creative approach to inserting their name into the subject line of the email. Personalize the pitch letter so they feel like you know their blog well and that they are the perfect resource to help you expand your business.

Fort Collins businesses who are interested in guest blogging for their business will find that these tips are just a few of the many ways to find that perfect blogger to contact. Consider these tips and put your creativity to the test by writing an intriguing blog post that will help you get your voice heard!

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, typography is “the style, arrangement, or appearance of typeset matter.”  In web design, typography is used to make the language on a webpage more visible by selecting the appropriate font, font size, line length, line spacing, and spacing between letters or group of letters.   If your Greeley web design practices good typography, your website will be not only readable, but it will convey the look and feel of your product or services.

1.  Choose the Right Font

Fonts are important for readability.  Usually for the content or body of the website, a sans-serif font is used.  Serif fonts are fonts that have a small accent or detail on the ends of the letters and strokes while sans-serifs is a font without the serif or detail/accent.   So, why use a sans-serif font for the content body?  Sans-serif fonts are easier to read on a monitor, especially when the size is reduced.  Serif fonts are usually used in headers, titles or logos because the sizes of the font are large enough to show off the details.

2.  Choose the Right Font Size

Be careful in choosing the right font size for your Greeley web design.  You don’t want your font size so small your reader’s eyes get tired, but you don’t want the size large that readers have to scroll too much to finish reading.

3.  Don’t Have Too Many Types of Fonts

There are no rules for how many different fonts you can use on your Greeley web design, but it is good to limit the number.  Choosing many font types may not look the same across different web browsers, so your design may look different than what you intended.  Also, it is very difficult to create harmony between different font types, so you can achieve harmony more easily by using fewer of them.

4.  Use the Right Color

Look at the background on your website design and make sure that the color you use for your font is readable.  Choose a light color font for a dark background and vice versa.  For a medium background or font, you need to experiment with both light and dark colors to see what works best.

5.  Practice White Space Balance

Using white space in your Greeley web design helps the website to be less cluttered so it is less stressful to read.  If the website is too cluttered, the visitor may close your website and forget about it.  For this reason, it is important to leave spaces for all margins and spaces between lines.  For the space between lines in the content area or lead-in, the general rule should be about 140% of your font size.

Ahhh….to WordPress or not to WordPress that is the question.

While WordPress did start out as a straight up blogging platform over the years it has grown into a complete CMS (content management system.)  We love WordPress here at Snap In Media and we are experts in using it.

We have many clients in Fort Collins and Northern Colorado who have had us design their company websites built on this stable and robust platform.  WordPress is SEO friendly and very easy to navigate so that you can get into the dashboard area and update content without paying someone to do it.  If you can run a word processor like MS Word of WordPerfect you can add new content to your website with WP.

There are other content management systems out there like Drupal and Joomla but we recommend WordPress to all of our clients.

Top 5 Reasons We Use & Recommend WordPress:

1. Completely customizable
2. Extremely fast
3. User/client friendly
4. Exceptional open source community helps keep it fresh
5. Tons of third party plugins to help customize any installation

I you need a website for your Fort Collins business we would love to sit down and talk about what WordPress can do for you.   We feel that an educated customer is a happy customer and that is win-win for everyone.

Call us today if you have any questions about how to use WordPress or are interested in using it as a content management system for your local business.

Custom logo design can be a tedious and frustrating process even for some of the best designers. With the amount of competition growing each day and businesses popping up each minute in Colorado, it’s hard enough to find an available domain name let alone create an original logo. Even with that being said, there is still plenty of creativity to be had in the logo design process.

Here are some helpful tips to help you create that perfect logo:

1.)    Always remember a logo isn’t just a mark. It’s a symbol that should represent a business through the creative use of fonts, colors, shapes and images.  A logo is for inspiring trust and recognition of a company. It should be memorable, timeless and versatile.

2.)    A logo should be versatile in its use. It must be scalable, for use with things like print work, t-shirts, icons, etc. To properly achieve scalability it is recommended to design your logo in a vector based application such as Adobe Illustrator.  A logo should also be effective without color. What does it look like in black & white?

3.)    Is your logo simple? It can be very easy to get out of hand when designing a logo. Too many colors and shapes and it can start to look cluttered real quick. A quick Google search of “Web 2.0 Logos” will reveal what I mean by simple. So don’t get carried away with your logo. Use only a few colors, and clean, basic and simple lines. Just look at the Nike logo which Is probably one of the simplest logos there is and look at how effective they have been with their branding.

4.)    Establish your own logo design process. Things like researching, brainstorming, sketching, etc.  It’s important you have a simple process you follow each time which will help make a new logo you do each time that much easier and your turn around time quicker.

5.)    Leave trends to the fashion industry. Although it is important to research and draw inspiration from others, it’s equally important to stand out from the pack. Trends come and go, so don’t be afraid to dream big. Work to be creative and original, and you may even start your own trend.

Custom logo design can make a huge difference in the way your customers see your services. Set you business apart from the others with custom logo design that focuses on the 5 tips above.

Small business owners in Colorado need simple and effective ways to connect with their customers and community. Many companies have caught on with social media, but what works best? Well, we think YouTube is one of the best, if not possibly the best for several reasons. The more obvious reason is, over 4 billion videos are viewed everyday just on YouTube. That’s 8 billion eyeballs consuming video content everyday! Need More?

Here’s 5 More Reasons Why YouTube Is Great For Small Business Marketing In Colorado:

1. You can reach a large audience with a single video.  A simple and effective ‘how-to’ or informational video can appeal to people all around the world with the internet. Videos are an easy way to get information across in a fun way. With a video, people can simply sit and watch.
2. You can promote your business as well as offer discounts and coupons when people follow-up with whatever is on your video. This is a good way to bring people in-store, or at least get some minds interested in what you have to say. A call to action is a crucial and valuable piece of a business’s success puzzle, and YouTube provides an easy venue to call your viewers into action.
3. It’s easy to add a personal touch to a video versus text-dominated websites such as Twitter or Facebook. You can show viewers and possible clients a closer, more intimate look into your business. Filming your business in action or capturing your employees on camera shows that you aren’t just a website, or a box of text (or JUST a video), it shows that your business is made of people
4. You can relate videos to other videos and create a sort of video mosaic for your viewers to piece together to really get a conception of your business’s ideology, goals, values, etc. Linking or relating step-by-step videos can be valuable. Connecting ideas shows future clients that you have something to offer them, and that you desire to help them with their needs.
5. Last, but not least, YouTube allows for the making of a branded channel, giving your business a more personalized, and professional look. A legitimate brand on your video page gives the viewer a sense of security and authenticity.

People are naturally attracted to video content and will pretty much watch anything and everything that exists on YouTube. The key to being successful with video content is being consistent and being the best. There are literally billions of videos to sift through on YouTube, so before you start recording, think about how your viewers can to relate to your small business in Colorado. What is unique? Why Colorado? Make sure you watch a few videos and get a feel for the message you would like to get across.

One of the most powerful weapons you can have in your marketing arsenal is an effective local search marketing strategy. What’s that? Well, it is simply a way to get your local business found online, much like the traditional yellow pages, only better.

Local search marketing is extremely important for local companies and small businesses that are trying to capture more customers and clients in the community. Social media is one highly effective method of reaching local communities, but the real winner is the company that appears high in search results on sites like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Here’s why: An astonishing 40% of Google searches are for local products and services (i.e. your company!)

Here Are 5 More Reasons You Need Local Search Marketing:

• Your business could appear above organic search results as a local superstar.
• List your business on a map so customers can easily find you.
• If an unhappy customer leaves a bad review, you have the opportunity to resolve the issue by responding to it publicly, in front of all your customers (Scary I know, but this is huge!)
• Your business will receive community recognition and eventually gain local consumers.
• Consumers are choosing local companies to stimulate local economies.

Local search marketing is rapidly evolving into a consumer tool that can be used to gauge a local product or service online quickly. Give your customers the right impression of your product or service with a local listing online and they are highly likely to contact you for more information, or better yet, ask you for your services.

Search for your product or service online and see if you have a local listing. If you do not, contact Snap in Media, the local search marketing experts in Northern Colorado, for a complementary 1 hour website consultation and local evaluation.

We will help you get in touch with your local customers.

Over the last few weeks, the newest social media craze has started booming. It’s called Pinterest. I’m sure by now almost everyone has heard of it, but Pinterest in a digital bulletin board that allows users to create and manage theme-based bulletin boards, and discover collections created by friends and it’s 11 million other users.

Pinterest was originally started and used for personal reasons. Recently however, brands and local businesses have started to use Pinterest as a marketing tool.

There are 5 reasons that Pinterest can be used as an excellent marketing tool for businesses:

1. Gives a Visual to Your Business:
A lot of people like to see what your business is all about. You can have the best sounding website and send out hundreds of tweets and Facebook posts about how great your business is but by creating a visual bulletin board it will allow you to give a visual definition to your business.  Images are the focus of your entire account which can be very beneficial for small businesses!

2. Specific Demographics:
Pinterest is primarily used by women ages 25 to 34 that have incomes of $30,000-100,000. Pinterest accounts for 3.6% of referral traffic to websites, which is less than Twitter by 0.1 percent. So by “pinning” certain items that relate to your business, it will help drive traffic to your business. Also, you are reaching an audience who do not visit other social networking sites and strictly just have Pinterest.

3. SEO Benefits:
When Pinterest was first launched, every image included a link that would return to the user to the original source page, which means this can highly increase your SEO value. Every pin comes with an embedded code for users that want to add that image to their own website or blog. When you embed the code into your website, it will show the original source which gives your site traffic.

4. Social Referrals:
Purchasing decisions nowadays are often driven by referrals and recommendations. Every time someone pins one of your posts they are endorsing you to all of their followers, which is essentially driving business to you!

5. YOU Have Control:
With traditional media, once the information leaves your hands you have lost control of what is said or how the message is conveyed. With social media, you have control of what you want said and with Pinterest you have complete control of the images and the ways you want them used. What you choose to pin on Pinterest reflects your business the way that you want it to.

Pinterest is becoming a serious social media platform for consumers and brands. So do your research and make an effective page that not only sells your brand, but also reflects the communities that you are already a part of! Happy Pinning!

You have a website for your business and you have just written a blog post about a new service, a discount, or some other topic related to promoting your company. Now what? Do you just post the article you agonized over for the past three hours at midnight? If you are using a content management system like WordPress or a blog host like WordPress.com or Blogger, you should definitely take advantage of the fact that you have the ability to schedule when your posts are published.

When Do I Schedule a Post?

A good rule of thumb to follow for scheduling content is to schedule them to go live in the morning. That is typically when most of your customers and readers will be online, checking out what happened while they were sleeping. However, knowing when to schedule your posts can be a learning process. If you are looking for interaction and responses to the post, or if you are just looking for hits on the page, you may want to do a little experiment by scheduling your posts at different times of day and even on different days. That way, you can look at which posts are getting the most action and feedback, and then cross-reference that with when they were published to get a better idea of when people are visiting your site and reading what is being posted to it.

One of the main things to keep in mind is your audience, i.e. your customers and potential customers. They visit your site to learn more about you, your company, your product and or services. While new articles about your company are a great way to connect with them, these articles will not help if your readers can’t find them! Make sure that your blog section or wherever your posts are published on the site is visible and easy for people to find if they have never been to your site before. Providing news and information about your company is a huge asset as long as people visiting your website don’t have to jump through hoops to find it.

Although your customers are your primary focus when you publish new information about your company on a blog or your main website, do not forget that the search engines are checking your content too. When it comes to the search engines, the best thing to remember is moderation:

1)      Moderate your keyword usage, i.e. don’t overuse them.

2)      Moderate your posts, meaning that you should not publish anything without first making sure that it is free of spelling and grammatical errors, as well as errors in formulation like broken links or pictures that don’t load.

3)      Moderate your schedule for new articles so that you don’t publish too many new posts all at once. Not only might this confuse the search engines, but your readers might have trouble following your announcements or articles if they can’t find where they left off on their last visit.

No matter what your goal is when providing new information for your customers online, learning how to schedule posts and when can help you become more effective in reaching your customers.