National Simplify Your Life Week

8/2/2014

The first week in August is National Simplify Your Life Week, a week to get organized and de-clutter for a more stress-free lifestyle. Negative clutter can invade every area of your life—not just your closets. Relationships, finances, kids, jobs, health and spiritual well-being are all adversely impacted by the unnecessary and harmful stuff we accumulate and hold onto. With crazy schedules and growing responsibilities, we are all looking for ways to simplify our lives.

Here are six top tips to 'simplify your life':

Limit paper, mail, emails, faxes, ect. Get on the do not call list to limit the incoming phone calls. Get your bills and financial statements online. Unsubscribe to email lists that you no longer follow.
Manage your papers. Your filing system should have current items only. Go through your mail everyday. Create action items to handle hold things such as bills, and "to do" items.
Plan the night before. Before you go to bed each night, prepare things for the morning. Set out your clothes for the next day and load up your work bag.
If you don't use it get rid of it!
Have a home for all of your 'stuff'. Everything has its place.
Keep a to-do list. Prioritize what needs to be done each day.

At Crawford Designs, our motto has always been, "Keeping it simple. Web. Graphics. Print." We know that these three areas of marketing are definitely not simple, but if you have a game plan, everything falls right into place. Let us help you simplify your marketing. Contact us today for a free consultation on your upcoming web and print projects.

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Ten Timeless Tips for Smart Marketing and Selling Online

10/15/2013

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Sell, sell, sell. The rule is quite simple. Marketing strategies are all about selling a service or product. No matter how brilliant a marketing campaign is, it is still a failure if it does not sell anything. The creative brilliance of the campaign should not overpower the message of sales. If you remember the advertisement, but not the service or product, then the strategy did not work.
Stick to proven marketing principles. There are proven marketing principles and they encompass all the mediums that we have today, even social media. Before online platforms were created we had to market using traditional means. With time, the advertising mediums change, but we need to follow the same principles.
It’s all in the planning. Without an appropriate plan, money will be wasted and the marketing strategy might not work at all. Tactics must be outlined in detail even if the business is very small scale. A scattered approach is not going to work for the business at all.
Is the product strong enough to sell? Essentially, the product has to be strong enough to be the focus of a marketing campaign. It does not matter if the marketing team is the best in the world if the service or product is not excellent.
Get hold of the data. Companies who have access to industrial databases are at an advantage. They have the edge over the competition, especially those who use the data to gain relevant insights.
Know how to listen. Many believe that listening is the number one marketing skill. It is not surprising that the most effective listeners execute the most effective marketing campaigns. Listening is a skill that comes with empathy and is fueled by curiosity.
Show people how they’ll benefit from the product. Since people are concerned mostly in what interests them, it will be smart to focus on letting them know how a service or product will be beneficial to them.
Relevance is the key. A smart marketing strategy is one that grabs hold of people’s attention at a split second. People must find the message relevant to their lives. If they do not then the message will be lost.
Target human emotion. Making a product sell is all about engaging people to feel for the product being offered to them. This is the foundation for establishing loyal customers. This also fully defines the brand. Your brand has to elicit an emotional reaction.
Identities evolve. Although brand logos and online identities can become the image of the brand for a certain period of time, things eventually change. This is the nature of branding. Trends are always changing and makeovers define modern-day advertising. It helps to keep a fresh approach.

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Do you need a Website ReBuild?

10/11/2011

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Ask yourself these questions:

Are you satisfied with your current website?
Is your website user-friendly and easy to navigate?
Do you have control over updating and editing your site?
Are your visitors turning into customers?
Does your website comply to current web standards?

If you answered No to ANY of these questions, Let us give you a FREE Quote on getting your website updated.

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Why Keywords Are Important

9/17/2011

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The nuts and bolts of SEO marketing are keywords. They are important for one reason and one reason only. They allow businesses who seek search engine rankings to target their rankings by using the correct language.

If you think about it, this is what good marketing has always done. Marketers deploy language for the purpose of persuasion. They hope to get their target audience to think about things by using the correct language and getting them to think and take action. SEOs do this using a specific type of language that is intended for two audiences.

The first audience is the human audience. You want your online content to speak to your human target audience in a way that your human audience takes action. That action, you hope, is to do business with you.

Your second audience is the search engines. Or their spiders. Search engine spiders are computer programs that crawl the Web through links and analyze the content on the pages. Today's search engine spiders are very sophisticated compared to the spiders of fifteen or twenty years ago. They analyze keywords, links, images, and a host of other on-page and off-page factors to determine the rankings of web pages for specific key phrases.

Because search engines have a ranking system, search engine optimizers try to target their content to the spiders in order to influence them on that ranking system. The goal is to increase their chances at getting good rankings.

Keywords are the nuts and bolts, the basic building fundamentals, of good SEO. If you want to rank well, start with good keyword research.

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15 Online Marketing Channels For Your Small Business

9/13/2011

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If you have a small business and you're wondering where to start in terms of marketing your business online, I've uncovered at least 15 places online you can start marketing your business. Here are the 15 best online marketing channels for small businesses. Try them all and see which ones work best for you.

Your Website - This should be the first place to start.
Your Company Blog - For many businesses, your blog will be on your website's domain so they could be viewed as one entity, but you could also put them on separate domains and have two websites - a static website and a blog.
Twitter - Post valuable news and insights in 140 characters or less.
Facebook - Start a business page and use your personal profile. That's two channels in one!
LinkedIn - Great for personal networking.
YouTube - Create videos and market them online. Drive traffic to your website.
Article Directories - There are a ton of them out there. Pick a handful and publish your articles for others to use on their websites, blogs, and newsletters.
Google Knol - Create your own knowledge base of articles and link them to anywhere you want.
HubPages - The cool thing about HubPages is you can have your own subdomain. Write and publish articles and even monetize them.
Squidoo - Squidoo is similar to Google Knol and HubPages, but a little bit snazzier.
PPC Ads - Stands for pay per click, those little ads you see at the top and the side of search engine results pages.
Google Places - Claim your local business listing at Google Places.
Bing Local - Just like Google Places, but owned by Bing.
Forums - Find a forum related to your niche and jump in, communicate with others with the same passion.
Groupon - Own a retail store? You can offer coupons at Groupon.

These are not all the online marketing channels you have, but they are some of the best ones for new businesses. I encourage you to check 'em out.

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National Simplify Your Life Week

Ten Timeless Tips for Smart Marketing and Selling Online

Do you need a Website ReBuild?

Why Keywords Are Important

15 Online Marketing Channels For Your Small Business

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