The Wet Sponge

On April 6, 2009 I will be presenting a workshop covering Internet Marketing for Accommodations and the Hospitality industry as part of the Blue Ridge Community College Small Business Center, “Prospering in 2009 Conference.”

Travel and Accommodations couldn’t possibly be a tougher subject in today’s economy. I have years of experience working with clients in this business – and there is no doubt everyone is hurtin’. They need all the help they can get.

So I combined everything I knew from past experience with fresh research. The resulting paper is available here as a PDF download.

Internet Marketing for Accommodations 2009

Much of the information applies to the region of Asheville NC and the broader area of the Blue Ridge Mountains – but even if you have a B&B, Inn, Vacation Rental or Hotel somewhere else, I hope you will find the resources I put together helpful and inspirational for your own situation.

This document is Copyright Fiona Dudley 2009, all rights reserved. (B&B and Inn owners, hotel owners/managers, and vacation rental owners are welcome to download it and share it with their community, friends, and network connections. Publication or reprinting for any other purpose requires permission.)

Actually, I prefer to say Artisans, Artists and Craftspeople. Here in the Asheville area of the Southern Appalachian Blue Ridge, there are more talented Artisans than there are churches on the country roads – and that’s saying a lot!

On February 23rd I was honored to present a brief seminar on Internet Marketing for Arts and Crafts at the Blue Ridge Community College Small Business Center, “Prospering in 2009 Conference.”

This is a tough subject. I spent many, many hours combining what I knew about the arts and crafts community in our region with a whooole lot of online research to prepare for this.

The difficulty for people who produce fine arts, traditional/heritage crafts, and modern interpretations of traditional arts, is online competition. There are so may huge sites out there that deal in “arts” and “crafts” it’s almost impossible to separate the disposable junk from the truly beautiful items that will become family heirlooms. In my area I’m within hollerin’ distance of fine jewelers, weavers and textile artists, basket makers, potters and ceramic artists, doll makers, metalwork artists, glass blowers, sculptors, quilters – you name it.

I already knew before going in that having a website displaying your wares will not get you much in the way of direct online sales. But a website is certainly a must – it acts as your online brochure and gallery, and there are ways to make that site work for you when you can tie it in to some other internet and media outlets.

The time allotted for my presentation was short – I knew we would not be able to discuss everything possible.

So I prepared a written handout for the participants. This 15-page Guide to Internet Marketing for Arts and Crafts (updated March 29, 2009) is available here, as a free PDF download.

Internet Marketing for Arts and Crafts 2009

This document is Copyright Fiona Dudley 2009, all rights reserved. (Artists are welcome to download it and share it with their community, friends, and network connections. Publication or reprinting for any other purpose requires permission.)

I encourage all my clients to use a blog these days, as a way of participating in social networking. It’s also a great way for site owners to be able to add new content to their site by themselves.

But 90% won’t do it, or don’t keep up with it.

The most common complaints are that it takes too much time out of their working day, and that they can’t think of anything to write about.

Let me dispell the first complaint. First, if you are a business owner, think of this as part of your overall marketing and advertising to generate customer loyalty and acquire new customers! Blogging is sooo easy these days – I promise. Plus it can be fun!!

Now – what to write about?

If you are stuck for things to write about, here are my suggestions:

1. Think about the questions your customers ask you. Chances are, if they have a question about your service or products, so do other people. Particularly potential customers.

2. Think about what friends and family ask you about your business at social occasions. When Mrs. Grundy asks “what do you do?” well, what do you tell her?

3. Write about anything you want! Don’t feel constrained to write about one specific subject.

4. Write about what interests you.

5. Don’t feel intimidated. You are not expected to be writing term papers Blog posts can be as short or as long as you like.

6. If an idea suddenly pops into your head but you don’t have the time this minute, jot it down on a little pocket notepad just for blogging ideas. Then get back to it later.

7. Take some time to surf the ‘net for fun. Participate in finding interesting sites, news, and use social networking/media. These can be great sources of inspiration for writing about your own thoughts and experiences.

8. Check out sites like www.askoxford.com which is a site all about words and word games, quotes and sayings, crosswords, etc. Just browse around  – something is bound to trigger a thought connection in your head.

Finally, if my own ideas haven’t helped yet – check out this article, Triggers for Story Ideas by Asheville Writer and Editor Susan Snowden. Susan has won many awards for her writing, and is one of the best professional editors I know. Her site contains many, many resources for writers of all kinds – including inspiration!

First you need a list of sites you want to link to – and request links from. See my previous post, Link Research Tools & Tips.

Now that you know who you’d like to get links from, what’s the best way to go about it?

Let me give you a real case study with my client, Cormark International – an exotic wood supplier for woodworking and woodturning.

Though the company has been in business for over 27 years, their site is relatively new, and they have only recently added a shopping cart for retail woodworking supplies.

They didn’t have many inbound links going for them – so here is what I’ve done:

1. I started by making sure their site and business are listed in all the “big” Local searches. I also did a few quality directory submissions, just to get the ball rolling. Plus I linked to them from my business site under Clients.

2. I researched competitor links and did online searches. I followed the breadcrumb trails. I manually visited and scoped out as many related woodworking sites I could find. Then I whittled down my list. Remember – quality is more important than quantity. In the process, I also uncovered some really great sites that were not linking to any competitors.

3. I built a Resources page for Cormark, and populated it with a couple dozen outbound links to sites that we all agreed were quality resources for Cormark’s site visitors, whether they link back to us or not. For example, I looked for sites that offered guidance, tips, tools, and free woodworking plans. I also looked for woodworkers’ sites offering items for sale that do not compete with Cormark.

4. I checked each desired site for specific information on exchanging links. Some have emails and forms available for that, and I used them. The key point here is – check out who owns the site, and whether they have any specific information regarding requesting links.

One site I found, www.kevinsbrady.net  contains a page amounting to a manifesto on how to request a link the right way – and it is a beautiful example of how link requests should be approached! Please read his page – he explains quite clearly as a site owner how to get through to him, or how to end up in his trash bin

5. The most important way to ensure you actually get some quality links is to do your homework right, find out as much as you can about the other site and the owner, and contact them directly – by name – with a personal letter or email.

6. I am continuing with the link request process, contacting a few sites at a time. There is some “suspicion” that if you suddenly load up your site with 100 inbound links, you’ve taken a frowned-upon shortcut rather than acquire decent, quality inbound links the “natural” way.

Link Campaigning is not the time to take shortcuts! Do it right and you will build up good links to your site. And don’t forget, as a site owner, part of your responsibility is to provide good links of your own to your visitors!

Give them a reason to come back.

Give other sites a good reason to link to you.

Even though the yardstick for web site popularity undergoes constant metamorphosis, your site still needs links – both inbound and outbound.

I have always recommended to my clients that they provide outbound links. It is a way of giving your visitors added value for visiting your site.

You also want to have other quality sites linking to yours. Despite social media and personalized search, inbound links still count for a lot with the search engines.

So how do you go about linking up and forming a good “community” of links for your site?

First of all, YOU need to have a way to link out to other sites. It can be a separate page (a Links or Resources page – name it what you will) or you can use text-based links placed directly in your site’s copy in appropriate places. These outbound links need to be easy to find – not a hidden or buried page.

How do you find quality sites?

No question this is going to take some time, but there are some tools available to help shorten the process.

1. Start with your customers, business associates,  or sites that you have found valuable!

2. Know who is already linking to you. You can usually discover who is already linking to you by investigating your site statistics provided for free by virtually all site hosting companies these days. Check out their sites, and if you think they would be helpful to your site visitors, then by all means link back to them.

3. Find out who is linking to your competitors. If a site links to your competitor, they might also be willing to link to you. Discovering this is tougher. You will probably need some software help. I use WebCEO for many purposes, and discovering links to competitors is one of the available tools. But it’s professional, expensive software. If you’re a sole operator in charge of your site, there are a couple of other options:

www.LinkDiagnosis.comis a free tool you can use. It derives its information from the Yahoo database. It also works better with FireFox and they provide a FireFox Plugin for getting the most out of their tools.

www.Link-Assistant.com : Not free (as of this writing, $147 but that’s very reasonable in this biz.) Their software bundles a lot of great tools for tracking links all over the place, as well as some very useful tools for weeding out the clunkers and determining if a prospective site is using naughty SEO tactics. I have not purchased and tried this software yet, but it’s on my list! This program was recommended to me by Ty, my good buddy and Internet Marketing Pro par excellence over at www.redvwbus.com .

4. This is the most time consuming method but tried and true. Follow the breadcrumb trails manually. If you discover a good site that links to you, check out all their other links. Then keep following. It sounds simple – and it is. And it works. It just takes time.

5. You can do a search on any search engine using terms directly related to your business, see what results come up, and check out the sites. This is a bit more hit-and-miss, but one thing it is good for is locating large directory or specialty sites where you can get free or reasonably-priced listings and links.

6. Don’t neglect to get your business listed in Google Local, Yahoo Local, and any authoritative, well-established local websites for your area. For example, www.Asheville.com is a case in point (by no means the only one) for my own local area.

7. Participate online! Use user groups and social media (such as Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Facebook, just a few examples) to communicate with other people in your business or related businesses. You can find some great sites to link to – and find folks who will happily link to you – with social media/networking. The key word here is participate. Don’t go for hard sell, it won’t work. Be a helpful, contributing community member and the links will follow.

YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE!

I have a client, let’s call them the Friendly Brothers. They provide a specific service in my geographic region. They have only one big competitor – let’s call them the Gorillas.

In all my years I’ve never seen anything as down and dirty – and stupid – as what the Gorillas have been up to.

The Friendly Brothers and I caught them running PPC ads using the Friendly Brothers’ trademarked business name. We caught them in the act, and used our handy-dandy “Print Screen” button. We now have permanent proof of it.

For that particular problem, a Cease and Desist appears to have made the ads go away – so far.

Then, I discovered that when you do a search for the Friendly Brothers dot.com, some very suspicious-looking results pages were coming up in the Top 10 listings. The listed pages contained my Friendly Brothers’ business name, but the URLS were definitely not related to our site or any SEO work we’d done.

Like a hound who’s just been shown a pile of Gorilla poop, I was on the trail.

Turns out these Top 10 listings were originating from a Classifieds website in Canada. There were a dozen or so ads on this site, advertising the same service, using my client’s business name, and a telephone number that “just happened to” be exactly the same as my client’s, except for the area code. And this info was showing up in the search engine results.

We decided to call the number. What we got was a residence, and the mumbled explanation was that the husband “used to be” in this business but wasn’t anymore – we could call again after he got home from work and talk to him.

Now, it is possible that it is a coincidence. I guess. But I’m not falling for it.

Fortunately the classifieds site has links for reporting spam and illegal/infringing ads. So far, we haven’t been able to backtrack the actual Gorilla that placed the ads – and they could have used a mule anyway.

The Friendly Brothers and I are still on the trail, and it’s a hot one.

The moral of the story is that if you try any of these stupid tricks, you can be easily found out AND find some letters from lawyers in your mailbox.

In this day and age, establishing your Brand and Credibility is critical on the web. Protect those assets. Be vigilant! It’s a jungle out there

For all you bloggers and social networkers out there who have used the Sociable WordPress Plugin:

Did you know where the default heading for the Sociable links, “Share and Enjoy” comes from? (Just look at the bottom of this post.)

It came from one of my all-time favorite authors, Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (TM) books.

In one of the earlier books, when it was still a trilogy (before it became a trilogy of 5 books), automated doors and tea-dispensing machines designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corp. would encourage their victims to “share and enjoy” as they utterly failed to perform their function. As many Hitchhiker’s Guide fans will know, this had dire consequences on occasion

It seems to me that the Sociable plugin and links are doing an admirable job – you can forward this blog post by email, tweet it, send to facebook, linked-in, sphinn it, even print it out. I love it!

I just wanted to let you folks know about the “Share and Enjoy” relationship to Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Douglas Adams was a genius writer who was taken from us waaaay too soon. He passed away in 2001 from a sudden heart attack (as I understand it). If you have not read the books but took a stab at watching the more recent movie by the same name, PLEASE listen to me. The movie sucked. It did not reflect the books or Adams’ wit in any way. Even I couldn’t sit all the way through it. Lord knows why, but Hollywood has a complete incapacity for translating GREAT sci-fi into movies.

Anyway – read his books!  Get CDs of the original radio play! (I first heard the original radio broadcasts from the BBC when I was a busted bohemian in Cambridge, MA. They are brilliant.)

Douglas Adams not only wrote…. Ok… brilliant again…. sci-fi, he was also a devoted environmentalist and active naturalist. His book Last Chance To See, is about his travels across the planet to document about a dozen species that are right on the brink of extinction. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Adams I would not have heard about Kakapos (New Zealand flightless parrots) or the Lemurs of Madagascar.

In addition to Hitchhiker’s Guide, he also wrote Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Brilliant. Again.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. Did I mention Brilliant?

Search for Douglas Adams on Amazon or Wikipedia and find out more about this genius of our time. He may be corporeally gone, but he is still with many of us who will NEVER be able to forget his gift for language, razor-sharp wit, storytelling, and devotion to this home we call planet earth.

OK, I know I’ve been way off topic for this blog, which is SEO and Internet Marketing – but until I get my old posts restored, might as well post a few quick personal ones.

My Bird Suet Cake Recipe

The birds LOVE my homemade suet cakes! Yes, I have tried any number of commercially-prepared ones, but the birds seem to have an “ok if I HAVE to eat this, I will.” But they devour the ones I make, and it’s a lot cheaper. (I did calculate it out once, turns out to something like 50 cents a cake.)

This Batch will fill up an 8 x 12 aluminum baking pan. It needs to be “brownie-deep” to hold it all. You will end up with 8 suet cakes.

1. You need wax paper or parchment paper too. Cut a piece of wax paper big enough to line your baking pan with a little overlap, and just sort of press it in there. Doesn’t matter if it springs back out – when you pour the suet mix in, it will settle everything.

2. Ingredients: Exact amounts are definitely not critical

8 large tablespoons of lard. Yes, LARD. NOT veggie-oil based lubricants. Look near the other oils & stuff at the grocery store – most stores in our area carry lard, or a.k.a. Manteca.

4 large tablespoons of crunchy peanut butter.

1/2 of a 1-lb bag of plain yellow corn meal.

“About” 1 and 1/2 cups of sunflower CHIPS/HEARTS. Yes, you can get away with other cheaper stuff like whole (black oil) sunflower seeds, but even though the hulled chips are more expensive, you’re not actually paying more in the long run for “the goods.” And it makes a much better, and neater suet cake. And, no messy hulls on the ground which are suspected of being like Walnut – containing toxins to nearby plants.

OK, enough of the naturalist asides….

Melt the suet and peanut butter on LOW heat – do not burn. When all is melted, add the corn meal, stir to break up lumps, and add the bird seed. Then when it’s cooled a bit pour it into your baking pan lined with wax paper. Throw it in the fridge. Should be solid within a few hours – then you can plop the whole thing onto a cutting board and cut it up into 8 cakes. I wrap mine in wax paper and keep in the fridge.

Don’t be surprised if you need a cake a day!

While I’m gradually re-adding the posts I lost when my blog crashed, on the day before Thanksgiving I thought I’d write a quick personal note about how to keep your turkey moist and delicious.

The secret is Brining it. You’ve still got time, and it’s sooo easy – here’s the how-to:

The day before Thanksgiving, hopefully you’ve begun thawing it out. Place your turkey in a cooler and enough of the following mixture to cover it:

For each gallon of water, add 1 cup of salt and 2/3 cup sugar (and stir it around to dissolve.)

Let the turkey sit overnight in its brine bath in a cool place, such as basement, garage, or even outdoors (as long as it’s not a hard freeze night.) Believe me, it will be fine

When you’re ready to cook your bird, just take it out of the brine, rinse it in cold water, pat it dry and do whatever you normally like to do with your turkey.

One final tip – it really works if you start your turkey roasting upside down, then turn it on its left side, then turn it on its right side, then finally, turn it breast-side-up.

Stuffed Winter Squash

Might as well throw in a couple more family favorites!

Acorn or Butternut sqash for this.

Slice them in half lengthwise and remove seeds.

Stuff them with a mixture of:

1 lb. mushrooms chopped & sauteed.
1 and 1/2 cups SOFT breadcrumbs, or use cornbread stuffing mix.
Add in a lemon squeeze, pinch of ground nutmeg, chopped fresh parsley, and salt & pepper to taste.
Bake at 400 degrees 35 min or until done, in a baking dish with 1/4″ of water in the bottom.

Colcannon

My favorite way to take mashed potatoes to another level. Based on old Irish/Scottish traditional recipe. Scale this up or down as needed.

2 large russet (Idaho or baking) potatoes, peeled and cut into large chunks.
3 cups thinly sliced cabbage
1/2 cup chopped white (or Vidalia) onions.
Some milk, some butter, some cheddar cheese and salt & pepper to taste.

Gently boil the potato chunks until ready to mash. Spoon out the potatos and use the same pot to cook the cabbage and onions until tender. While they’re cooking, mash your tatties. Never over-mash potatos or they go gummy!

Drain the cabbage and onions, and add them to your potatos. Add about 1/2 cup milk (or some half and half if you are decadent like me), butter quantities, and salt and pepper to taste. Gently stir it all up.

Place in a greased baking casserole and top with grated cheddar cheese, and bake until it’s all hot and the cheese has melted.

Heavenly! I wa going to try it using baby bok choy instead of cabbage this year but my husband wimped out when he saw the price – so it’s good old fashioned Scots-Irish cabbage again for us. Believe me, after simmering the cabbage in the potato water it will be VERY mild.

On November 22, I tried to use a plugin for automatically updating my WordPress version. It crashed. I couldn’t log in. I had done backups but to no avail. I tried everything short of starting over.

Guess what – I’m starting over aaaalll over again.

So I thought I’d write some tips and advice on how to avoid what I went through!

Step 1: Make sure your site and/or blog is hosted by a company that provides you with cPanel and Fantastico Deluxe. I happen to use www.hostgator.com for my hosting needs. But there are plenty of other good hosting companies that also offer these features. Just make sure YOURS does.

Step 2: Re-read step 1.

With cPanel and Fantastico Deluxe, you can:

1. Install WordPress either as an add-on to your existing site, or as a stand-alone site, with pretty much one click.
2. Back up (and restore) your WordPress database.
3. UPGRADE your version of WordPress without all the techie hassles or even needing a plugin.
4. Re-read #3.

After I had desperately tried everything, and finally had to resort to a totally new WordPress install, I discovered that Fantastico Deluxe now offers the WordPress update feature. If I had known that, I could have easily avoided HOURS of panic and mind-bending hassle. Not to mention time I’ll have to spend now re-adding prior posts.

Step 3: After installing WordPress, use your cPanel to back up your database before you do anything else!

Step 4: Continue to do regular backups.

More tips:

If you find yourself having to do a completely fresh install, go get the latest versions of your themes, plugins and widgets you might have used in the past. Might as well

It’s a good idea to save your posts by copy & paste into a word processing document or Notepad, and save them individually in case you ever have to restore a post.

(Re writing your posts in advance in, say, Word, I have found one problem. If you copy and paste your text from a Word doc into the WordPress Write Post window, like I am now, the paste includes all sorts of horrible formatting stuff carried over from Word. So I generally write my posts directly in WordPress. You can always just keep it as a draft until you’re done. )

If the worst case scenario happens and you do have to start all over, look at it this way – you now have a chance to make your blog even better I’m using this “forced opportunity” to add a couple of plugins and redesign the layout of my blog to make it a bit more user-friendly.

A blog is a terrible thing to waste – but may you never need to know what I’ve just written