Good blog post regarding consulting. What’s appropriate for your size business.
Remember this: Companies don’t do business with companies. People do business with people. No matter what, the finial decision to work with your company comes down to a PERSON making the choice to work with YOU.
We have been working the last few months on new small business website offering. Need a great looking and easy to website, but not for the big agency price?
Launching August 2009 is Page.ly, a website builder tailor made for you. Hosting + Personalized Domain + Email + built in website editor and blog. Page.ly is based on WordPress, with over 10 million users wordpress is the most widely uses web publishing tool. Better Websites, Fast. Learn more at Page.ly
Page.ly is a new product we are developing that allows for quick creation of WordPress based websites, complete with hosting, domain name registration and email service.
This is screen shot of the WordPress backend of a page.ly site. We created an API that allows the client to administer email services back on the server without having to login to a separate panel.
After Authenticating the user is able to create and modify aspects of email accounts such as adding mail alias, setting redirects, and changing mail account passwords.
We are happy to announce the pending launch of page.ly, a website builder we have created to provide a complete online website solution for small businesses. page.ly lets you create your own website with just a few clicks of a mouse. Every page.ly site is fully customizable with dozens of provided themes/templates and the ability for users to add their own. Powered by the wordpress, page.ly has many built in features that make keeping your website up to date a cinch. page.ly also provides users with their own domain name, and email service. A complete small business website builder.
Page.ly will launch mid-summer.
We are very proud and much relieved to have re-launched BestPartyEver.com. BPE is a website we own and operate an has often times been the forgotten child, but is now the center of our portfolio.
BestPartyEver.com is an online community that helps you plan that special event. Find thousands of free party ideas, recipes, special event vendors to hire, and party planning tips from industry professionals. A suite of party planning tools also makes it super easy to manage the details of your party with guestlists, online invites, budget calculators, event schedules, and to-do lists.
We are extremely excited to offer all this party goodness to the public. Please check it out, and enjoy.
We have been tinkering on some side projects and are happy to release:
pix.ly allows you to pull photos from yours are anyone else flickr account and rate them in a vs. style contest. Rate your flickr photos now.
Do you twitter? twit.pix.ly lets you rate your friends Avatars in a vs. style content. The ultimate twitter avatar battle is going on now.
Better late then never, but 5 years late?
Social Media Will Change Your Business
Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business—including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)
Wait for it…
A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like—you guessed it—blogs. Clay Shirky, a Web expert at New York University, calls it “an absorption process where the thing doing the absorbing changes.”
If you have 15 minutes, read the full article. If you don’t, just understand this. Your successful online marketing = Social Media.
Update, this needs a graph to illustrate why this businessweek article is 5 years too late. We are now about dead middle of the red adoption curve.. relevancy is bottoming out soon as the medium is taken over by said corporate entities mentioned in businessweek article.
We did a short post on tending your social garden over on our Arizona SEO blog. Worth a read.
While some may see time spent on social networks a waste, it really can be a productive endeavour. The name recognition, branding reinforcement, and personal connections you can make can prove valuable in tangible and intrinsic ways down the line. Tending your social garden in as important to business today as the trade show was 15 years ago.
The movie was awesome, but this post is about a milestone we reached with our party ideas and party planning website bestypartyever.com.
As of today, 25 days since we launched the ALL new (v3) website, our 300th user just registered. The velocity of user sign-ups is increasing . I think it took over 15 days to get the first 100. While of course we are aiming for 100k users in the next few months, we’ll take the first 300 and be dang happy about it.
Takeaway:
Build it and they will come.. Um, No.
Ponder this: How are people going to find your new website? When they get there, is there enough to keep them around? Will they tell their friends about it? Are you offering the user enough as a trade for their time investment in registering and providing contact/user information? How deep are your pockets for marketing and promotion? Are people talking about your new product or service. Is it buzzworthy?
These are just a few of the many questions you should have answers for when contemplating a new website/community. We addressed many of these prior to launching the website. We already had great search engine rankings (learn about our search engine optimization services) for the v2 site which carried over and are improving. We have worked diligently to give the user some great tools and resources to make it worth their time to register. Sally did some interviews to get the word out, and we have leveraged other social networks (BPE on: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, UstreamTV, Squidoo) to bring people into the fold. And finally we gave users of bestpartyever.com this simple option of inviting their friends.
As an example I spoke with a potential client the other day about building them a new social utility, the $50k estimate for development I gave them did not seem to phase them, but the $50k in marketing/promotional budget I suggested for the first 6 months was met with silence on the other end of the phone. Wake up, this is what it takes folks. While the idea of bootstrapping a company from nothing to Internet stardom is valid, and has been done more than once, in practice the odds are not stacked in your favor.
In the future we are planning more seamless integration into other websites and services to make it even easier for our users to interact and share. Your website is not (and should not be) an island. In todays marketplace: it MUST be connected.
It has been a long few weeks with the launch and the frenetic pace of development. Sally and I are heading to Mexico for a few days, You are invited.
Linda VandeVrede over at ValleyPRBlog.com shared her thoughts on Sally’s PR style.
“Sally Strebel (aka Bizgirl on Twitter) has some of the best PR advice I’ve ever heard for new businesses: “Whoever is biggest and baddest in the room, don’t be afraid to go up to them.â€
Sally is VP here at Obuweb, and Founder and CEO of BestPartyEver.com, a party planning social network.