Today’s Webs user example website comes to us all the way from Reykjavik, Iceland! Jon Arnar is an artist who uses his website to promote his exhibitions, show off his fantastic body of work, and sell paintings through an online store.

Aside from being up-to-date and robust, one feature that really makes Jon’s site stand out is his use of a very appropriate Webs theme called “Gallery” (appropriately).

This is a clean and understated theme that offers a little something extra toward the footer to give visitors a sense of place. This is especially nice for artists like Jon who live in a particular city but sell their artwork to people all over the world.

As evidenced by his offer of free worldwide shipping, Jon has an international audience. While he does have exhibits throughout Reykjavik, it’s great for his international fans to be able to visit this virtual art gallery to view his latest works and purchase artwork from his online store.

Do you have a favorite Webs theme, or have you seen one used in a very thoughtful way? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

We’ve recently talked about how to promote your business by promoting yourself, but have you thought about where to do this?

Well, the short answer is everywhere. You never know when a great networking opportunity may present itself, so you should always bear in mind that you are the face of your business. The long answer (aka, this blog post) is at small business networking events where you can meet others who are in your community and possibly in your industry. These events are often educational, but are valuable beyond that for building a network of people you can go to for advice, and who can recommend your business to people in their own networks.

So where can you find out about these small business networking events? Here are four great places to start:

1. Chamber of Commerce
Perhaps the least surprising on our list, your local Chamber of Commerce is a great resource not only for education and advice, but also for hosting networking events that bring small business owners and community members together. Membership fees are different for every chamber, but Webs local chapter in Silver Spring, MD starts at $300/year for a sole proprietorship, and goes up incrementally depending on your number of employees.

Examples of upcoming events near Silver Spring: Business-After-Golf, Networking Breakfast, 2013 Awards and Installation Dinner.

2. U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA.gov)
Another great locale for all things small business is SBA.gov. We’ve discussed the various online resources available here in a previous post, but another important element of this organization is their “Local Assistance” area. In this community section, you can browse all upcoming small business events, or search by your local community.

Examples of upcoming events near Silver Spring: National Women Contractors’ Week, Small Business Financing Forum, Q&A Luncheon with SBA Administrator Karen Mills.

3. Meetup
You may know Meetup.com as a great place to find a running group, fellow salsa dancers, or people to go bungee jumping with. But did you know there are also lots of great small business Meetups? These communities are a wonderful resource for support and networking, and they are most often free or very inexpensive to join.

Small Business Meetups near Silver Spring: DC-MD Small Business Owner Networking, Shoestring StartUps, The Washington Photography Business Meetup, Smart Business Connects.

4. Eventbrite
Most people are familiar with Eventbrite as a purchasing portal they are sent to in order to buy tickets online for a local event. But the service has also evolved to offer a database of events that is searchable by topic and location. This is a great way to find lots of local happenings without having to be plugged into the particular group that’s hosting them. Just key in “small business” and your location and see what’s coming up!

Upcoming SMB events near Silver Spring on Eventbrite: Small Business Mixer May 2013, Small Business Expo, 1^st Annual Small Business Showcase, Small Business Summit and B2B Expo.

Now that you know how to promote your business as yourself, and where to network with community members, don’t forget to have some great promotional products to hand out when you go!

Let us know where you like to network with your community in the comments below.

Our series on promotion for small businesses rolls on today with an insightful look at the power of promotional products from our friends at Vistaprint. In a recent blog post, they discussed five major benefits of using promotional products as a marketing tactic, which we’d like to share with you today.

Consider this statistic: of the people surveyed, 52% said their impression of a company is more positive after receiving a promotional product from them, and nearly 50% use those products daily. How did your last marketing tactic stack up against those numbers?

5 Benefits of Using Promotional Products:

1. Increased brand recognition.
A goal for businesses, big and small, is often brand recognition. How can you make your brand not only stand out from the competition, but also remain in the minds of customers, both current and potential? One way is to get creative with your marketing. Promotional products are a simple tool that can help increase brand awareness for your small business; by customizing an item that a customer can use in his or her everyday life with your logo, for instance, you’re able to keep your small business top of mind.

2. Mass outreach at a low cost.
With a tight budget, it can be difficult to choose exactly what marketing items make the most sense for your small business, and what items will give you the most “bang for your buck.” With a small price tag but large, lasting impact, promotional products are a great value for your investment. Keep this in mind: A simple giveaway is a great way to increase customer loyalty. If you own a storefront, including a fun takeaway with purchases is a nice way to say thanks!

3. Alternative business card.
While business cards will always be an incredibly valuable business staple, promotional products are a fun, creative way to showcase your contact information. Instead of just leaving a potential customer with your business card, for example, consider leaving behind your business card AND another tangible, branded product. If you own a computer company, and just fixed someone’s machine, pass out your business card and a USB drive!

5. Tactile.
When it comes to marketing your business, another thing to keep in mind is repeat exposure. How can you keep what you do, and your business, consistently in front of customers without consistently spending a ton of money? Easy: Think about what items your customers will want to keep around. If you own a spa, for instance, put an appointment reminder on the back of your business card, as customers will want to keep that around to remember when they have to come back. If you run a bar, think about handing out free bottle openers or koozies.

5. Powerful marketing platform.
What does your marketing portfolio look like? Think about this: If you had to choose between eating the same pizza, twice a week, every week, for lunch, or getting two different lunches each week instead, what would you pick? We think most of you would choose variety. The same principle can be applied to your small business. Although having staple marketing products is important, being able to vary what you’re using to brand your business is important, too!

Read the full article on the Vistaprint blog. 

This week’s Webs user site is a great example of how small businesses can use branded events to promote themselves and create exposure and buzz. One of the big advantages of having a small business with the interaction you can foster with your local community. It’s a great way to get your name out there, form relationships, and get people spreading the word about your business.

Beantown Cornhole, located in the Boston area, builds and sells high quality boards and bags for the game of Cornhole. In addition to the products that they sell, however, they also host weekly contests and charity tournaments year round. This strategy serves two important marketing purposes:

First, events like these (especially the charity tournaments), are a great way to build your brand within your community, and get a lot of exposure from local media. Whether it’s actual news organization or the various “happenings” listings that most cities provide in spades these days, holding an event makes sure a lot more people hear your name than they might from an expensive ad campaign. As for your brand benefits, people who attend your event and have a great time will always associate that positive experience with your business.

The second marketing benefit for Beantown Cornhole is that they are able to show off their products and have people interact with them without having to purchase them. This is a great way to reach people who are actively seeking your product, and those who will now think of you in the future when they might be in the market. They can get an overall sense of the quality they can expect and keep that in the back of their minds.

No matter what your business, chances are with a little creativity you can find a way to either host an event, sponsor one, or become a participant somehow in another business’s event. We’d love to hear what you come up with!

Promotion, one element of your marketing mix, is the set of tactics business owners and marketers use to achieve a defined goal for the business or brand. And whether your next promotion is digital (a contest, a landing page on your website, an email) or print (brochures, a postcard mailing, your business cards) there are number of pitfalls to watch out for. Here are 10 of the big ones that can really tank your next promotion:

1. Failing to identify your goals. A personal trainer once told me, “fail to plan, plan to fail.” This also rings true in marketing. Without defining what you hope to achieve with your promotion, your effort is doomed from the start. Wikipedia identifies 3 possible objectives for promotions as

- To present information to consumers
- To increase demand
- To differentiate a product

Identify your goal before you decide on your strategy and your promotion will be much more successful.

2. Forgetting on which side your bread is buttered. In planning your promotion, bear in mind the current customers you want to retain while creating the strategy to attract the new customers you want to acquire. If your strategy wins you 10 new clients but alienates 25 current ones in the process, it’s hard to mark that as a win.

3. Selling yourself short by relying on discounts. There is, of course, a time and place for sales. If you want to get new customers to try your product, or clear out inventory, sales have their place. But if sales are the only trick up your sleeve, you can start to devalue your product or service. Instead, try to be more creative and find better ways to engage your potential customers that highlight what’s great about your offerings.

4. Not asking for permission. This is especially true for digital promotions via email. Buying lists or collecting customer contact information without expressly informing them that it will be used for email communications is a big no-no from a legal standpoint, and also for your brand. No matter how great your offer or your product, if people associate it with having their privacy violated, they’re not going to want to shop with you.

5. Pilfering images from the internet. This should go without saying, but in case anyone is confused: copying images you find on the internet to use in your promotions without permission is not okay. First, it can get you in hot water legally. Second, they will likely be of a lower quality than images you get legitimately and can reflect poorly on your brand. If you’re looking for artwork and you don’t have the money to pay a pro, check out sites like Flickr’s Creative Commons. There are a variety of licensing options here, and a lot of good free artwork that you simply have to attribute.

6. Not calling your viewer to action. The most beautiful email campaign or the most thoughtfully crafted brochure is nothing without a great call to action, or CTA. This is the part of your promotion that tells people what to do next. If you send an email campaign out about your newest product, don’t just tell people why it’s great…tell them to buy it! Don’t rely on people’s send of logic here. Emails that have a well-placed CTA are much more successful. Extoll your new products virtues, and then offer a nice big button telling the viewer to “Order Today!”

7. Using industry jargon in your writing. This is an easy trap to fall into if you offer a product or service in a technical or specialized field. If you offer water filtration systems there will be lots of terms that you and your collaborators are familiar. Your potential clients, however, are not so well-versed. Avoid abbreviations, acronyms, or any terms that you say to your spouse and receive a blank stare in return. Instead, talk to your readers about benefits and how your product or service can address their needs. They don’t need to know how it works to know that they want one.

8. Cheaping out on your print materials. There’s no rule that says quality has to be expensive. But do make sure that your sole criterion when choosing your print materials is not price. You should determine the level of quality you want, and then find the best price in that range. The brochures, business cards, postcards, and flyers that your potential customers will interact with say a lot about your company and can form a lasting impression – good or bad. (We think our friends over at Vistaprint are a great place to start!)

9. Skipping over the proof reading step. The importance of editing and proofing when it comes your print or digital materials can not be overstated. You can have everything a client is looking for, but a few typos can really damage their impression of you. No matter how carefully you wrote and designed it, always always always have a fresh pair of eyes look it over before hitting publish or sending it off to the printer

10. Forgetting to measure your results. An often overlooked, but nonetheless crucial, element of any promotional campaign is measurement. If you don’t measure the success of this promotional strategy, how will you know what to do next time? This is easier, of course, for digital promotions like social media contests and email campaigns. But it can also be done in print. Consider giving a discount or a free gift if someone brings in a postcard you sent, or have them mention a flyer they saw when they call. You should also always request information on how a client found you when you interact with them.

Those are our top 10 promotional pitfalls, but there are lots of other things to look out for when planning marketing promotions. What advice do you have for other marketers out there? Let us know in the comments below!

Continuing May’s theme of promotion for your small business, today’s topic deals with how your presentation of yourself as the owner of your business can help (or hinder) your marketing efforts. Turns out, our Head of Marketing has recently had a lot of experience on this front, so we’ll turn this one over to Rochelle: 

No matter how much time and effort you spend on creating a compelling and consistent brand for your business in order to have effective marketing and promotion, there is one element many small business owners overlook: their own personal brand.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently in my personal life.  My husband and I bought a new home in September, while we’re committed to doing a lot of the work ourselves, we are currently interviewing for some of the more difficult jobs.

So over the past month, we’ve met with professionals ranging from general contractors to landscapers to plumbers.  It’s been interesting to whether or not the business owners or representatives match the company elements we’ve seen online (including the company website and profiles on sites like Yelp and Angie’s List).

Some of these professionals have really “lived the brand”—the things that they tell us are consistent with what we’ve read online, and they’ve been very professional.  Others have been really…surprising.  One landscaping company owner came to our home with no information or marketing materials, was rather disheveled, and provided a quote that was three times the cost of other quotes we had received.  While his website was beautiful and he got very strong reviews, our experience with him in person was so poor that we wouldn’t even consider the additional cost.

In so many ways, you are “the cover” of your business, and like it or not, people will judge your business on your own presentation.  And as a small business owner you may run into potential customers and partners at any time, making it even more important to “live your brand” at all times.  While it might be additional work in the beginning, the dividends will pay off in the long term.  Some simple things you can do:

- Keep business cards and branded note cards handy for chance meetings.

- Craft your customizable “elevator pitch”. Anything that feels too practiced is inauthentic, but try to have a few key takeaways that you can work into a conversation organically that will really resonate.  Examples:  “we’ve transformed over 40 homes in this neighborhood by refreshing the colors” or “we’re so proud to have been rated the top Tex Mexican restaurant in the area for the past 3 years.”

- Always follow up on promising conversations, either personally or through social channels like LinkedIn. Customize your communication by referencing things you discussed, and request next steps that don’t require a lot of work from the person you’re contacting.

Time for another great website example from a Webs user! Feels like it’s been awhile since our last example site review, so let’s dive right in.

Today we’re going to take a look at the website of El Faro Restaurant in Summit, Illinois. The first thing you’ll learn about El Faro form their website is that this is the home of the Giant Burritos (we’re sold already!). The second thing you’ll notice is that they are open 24 hours, which is great because the middle of the night is the perfect time for a giant burrito.

What the owners have done here is to identify their USP – Unique Selling Proposition – and promote that right up front. This is the thing that makes your business unique among competitors. There are probably a number of other Mexican restaurants in Summit, but El Faro sets itself apart by serving up giant burritos at all hours of the day and night. So why not make sure people see that information first?

They go on to offer all of the other relevant information that you want from a restaurant – a robust menu, photos of the food and interior, the location, and contact information. But before you get into all that, you already know what El Faro is about.

One of the most important features of a unique selling proposition is that it is authentic. People can tell when the aspect of your business you choose to promote is not really central to it – it just feels fabricated. But judging from the testimonials smartly presented on El Faro’s page, the late night giant burrito really is what people connect with at this restaurant.

Keep up the good work, El Faro! And if you’re looking to open another location, we hear Silver Spring, MD is really nice…

The month of May here on the Webs blog will be dedicated to promotion and marketing of your small business and, of course, your website. We’ll kick things off today with a categorized list of places to list or promote your website or services that can help bring you more traffic, and ultimately more business.

You may recognize a number of these suggestions from a very popular post we did on this topic awhile back. As new sites have been added to the web, and we got some great suggestions in the user comments, we decided to post a shiny new version for you here today. Enjoy, and if you have any suggestions or your own, please feel free to add them in the comments below!

Social Media Bookmarking
Sites that help readers to bookmark favorite sites, links and news articles are a great way to spread information about your latest blog post and gain quality backlinks that give your website more credibility with search engines.

1. Del.icio.us
2. StumbleUpon
3. Digg
4. Reddit
5. Pinterest
6. ScoopIt

Online Directories
Submitting your website to popular online directories can help you gain more visibility through targeted searches and increase your website search engine ranking.

1. Google Local
2. Yahoo Local
3. Bing Business Portal
4. DMOZ
5. Merchant Circle
6. Yelp
7. Manta
8. Craigslist
9. Spotlight Business Directory

Article Marketing
Writing an article specific for your niche interest is a good way to convey expertise both for yourself and your business, product and website.

1. EzineArticles
2. Hub Pages
3. Go Articles
4. Article Dashboard
5. Business Know-How

Press Releases
If you recently introduced a new product or service, writing and submitting a free press release can help generate a bit of buzz about it. In addition, if your press release has links back to your website, it can be great for your search ranking.

1. PRLog
2. Free Press Release
3. 24-7 PressRelease
4. 1888PressRelease
5. PR-Inside (European-based distribution)

Information Forums
Sometimes the best way to get someone’s attention is by reaching out and providing something they need. Answering questions or offering help on forums can be a great way to get noticed, get your website out there, and establish yourself as an expert in a certain field.

1. Quora
2. Ask
3. Yahoo! Answers

The internet is a big place, folks. There are probably dozens of smaller niche opportunities for getting your name out there. Keep up the good work researching ways to promote your website, and let us know what you find!

Hi everyone—this is Rochelle from the Webs marketing team.  Sarah is giving me guest blogging privileges today to tell you about a new product development I’m really excited about: our Webs SEO Booster.

For the uninitiated, SEO stands for search engine optimization and it refers to the practice of making your website available for search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing to include in their results when someone submits a search. When you simply publish a site, these search engines will generally find it and include it in their massive index of content.  But you want to do more than get indexed—you want to make sure that the search engines associate your site with the terms that your customers and potential customers are typing into search engines, hoping to find a site or business like yours.

That’s where our SEO Booster comes in.  It helps you identify the keyword phrases that are the best match for your business and will help you get the highest quality traffic to your site.  The SEO Booster then provides step-by-step instructions for putting these keyword phrases in the right places on your site to position your it well for the search engines. I’m using a lot of keyword phrases myself to explain this—maybe a video would do a better job of demonstrating the tremendous power of the Webs SEO Booster:

I’m so excited about the SEO Booster because I’ve spent a lot of my career helping large corporations deploy these practices on their websites to bring in more high quality traffic, so I’m passionate about bringing this to some of my favorite people—Webs users! The SEO Booster is available for free to Webs Pro subscribers, but is also available as an add-on option to all subscribers.  Happy optimizing, and as always, please reach out to our support team with any questions you have about SEO Booster.

Today we wrap up our discussion of time management and efficiency with one final strategy for boosting productivity for yourself and anyone you work with: changing your environment.

Finding ways to incorporate the advice we’ve shared over the past month into your work routine can have great long-term effects on the quality of your life and work. Looking for something that can make a big change right away? Try rearranging the furniture and putting up a fresh coat of paint.

Color can have a major impact on the work people do. This point is echoed in an article on the Sherwin-Williams website: “research indicates that employees bathed in soothing blue might be more relaxed and collaborative. Add some stimulating red or orange to a conference room, and meetings might move along faster. To keep staff from feeling closed in while toiling in a cramped office, cool, light tones can help make their space seem larger.”

In a nutshell, a great way to quickly recharge your office space can be to change the way it looks. But make sure before you start picking out paint colors that you identify your goals. Do you want to bring more energy to the office, or create a more relaxing environment? Of course color is not the only way to change things up; consider rearranging desks, getting new furniture, or changing the way teams are arranged if you work in a larger space.

This spring was an exciting time here at the Webs office. After many years with a bland beige and cream color palette, our leadership decided it was time to inject new life into the space. The goals were to add energy, reinforce the Webs brand in the wall colors, improve collaboration, and give the teams room to spread out a bit. And we are delighted with the results! That’s one thing about an office being overdue for a renovation – when if finally does happen, it’s very special for the people who work in it. Check out the pictures below to see how our space has changed. If you feel inspired to refresh your surroundings, post a photo to our Facebook page! 

Before:

After:

Of course, we kept our employee Avatars right where they were:

From The Time Management Series:

Real Time Management Strategies From Real People
Spend Less Time on Social Media: Pagemodo Posts
Time Management Tips for Small Business Owners [INFOGRAPHIC]
How To Stay Fit While You Work: Ideas For Small Business Owners
How To Stop Procrastinating: Tips For Getting Unstuck
Don’t Worry, Be Happy: It’s Good For Your Business!
Save Time on Social: Keyboard Shortcuts for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter
4 Big Time Management Tips for Small Business Owners
Improve Your Efficiency Through Total Inbox Zen