I can’t believe the year is almost half way through. It has been a somewhat busy year for us at Nelson & Co., primarily because of the EarthSports.com project. For those who haven’t listened to me carry on about it, EarthSports.com was a company that I was involved with during the dot com boom. We sold it to a company in Phoenix, AZ in 2002 and three years later, they closed their doors. I bought the domain back and sat on it until a couple entrepreneurs came out to see me around Christmas 2008. They had an idea for an outdoors websites and I mentioned my experiences during the dot com era and that I had bought the domain name back. From that day on, we’ve been working towards this day. Around Christmas 2009, they got their funding and we got started. We hired five programmers, leased out some space adjacent to mine and went to work.

The site’s initial goal was to be a social and informational resource for anglers in the beginning and then move into other industries such as hunting. It would have a means to find and hire fishing guides as well as socialize with other fishing enthusiasts, post photos and videos, read blogs and forums, have access to all the cool new products the industry has to offer, organize fishing trips and create groups such as college fishing team.

On July 1st, that goal was realized and we soft launched earthsports.com. We will be traveling to Las Vegas on July 14th for the iCast industry fishing show to begin our marketing launch. This really is a great website and we’re pouring new features into it on a weekly basis.

As a friend, family member and/or business associate, your opinions mean a lot to me, so thank you in advance for any time you commit to discovering and experiencing our newest website…

EarthSports.com

Best Regards,
Damien Nelson

Everyone gets annoying emails from unsolicited businesses pushing their various products and services, but there are some company e-newsletters you actually subscribe to and look forward to receiving. For us, there are several website and web marketing newsletters that we pay close attention to. How do these companies staff, manage, and acquire customers for such an undertaking? Nelson & Co. has implemented a solid solution for many of its customers through the use of the blog tool and rss feeds described in Step 1. You now have your blog tool and articles are being written. Through the use of a third party email marketing service, Nelson & Co. establishes customer accounts for broadcast email services, uploads a customer database you provide, and installs subscribe and unsubscribe functionality on your current website. This gives your site visitors the opportunity to register or request to be removed from your e-newsletter mailling. We then take it one step further by creating an e-news blog category and setting up an e-newsletter template on your server, which uses the RSS functionality of your blog tool to pull the most recent articles into the e-newsletter. For example, at any given point, this template is pulling various articles such as Press Releases, Upcoming Events, and Tips/Tutorials to various sections of the page. We then code the 3rd party tool to grab this e-newsletter and do a broadcast to the existing email database on a regularly scheduled timeline…whether it be once a week or once a month. You now have yet another way to reach out and make contact with clients and prospects.

You now have the following benefits:

1. Increased search engine rankings
2. Visitors to subscribe to your feeds and get updates every time you post something in the blog
3. Fresh content fed from blog to various sections of website
4. Facebook and Twitter accounts with fresh content fed from blog
5. An automated e-newsletter
6. One location to post content and initiate everything!

Short of paid advertising, you now have a comprehensive web marketing program that is as easy to manage as possible. This does not diminish the fact that basic search engine marketing principles should first be implemented into your website, but more of a “next steps” action to further promote your website online.

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Nelson & Co. is a Sugar Land, Texas based graphic design firm serving the Greater Houston area with turn-key print, multimedia and web design projects since 2002 and is proud to be listed in the Houston Business Journal’s Book of Lists as a Top 25 Graphic Design Firm serving corporate, mid-sized and even start-up businesses alike with powerful branding and marketing tools. For more information on Nelson & Co. visit www.nelsonandco.net or contact us at (713) 960-1511.

Nelson & Co.  •  2277 Plaza Dr. #250  •  Sugar Land, Texas 77479  •  713.960.1511

*Nelson & Co. does not condone annoying or illegal email marketing practices and we promote the use of legal marketing practices as  outlined by the Federal Trade Commission with the CAN-SPAM Act.

So, you have your website blog, staff members are writing articles for various categories and an Editor is reviewing and publishing them for the world to see. You are also providing industry knowledge and expertise to clients and prospects, as well as increasing your search engine visibility along the way. But we can still do more. The rest of your website has content that doesn’t change on a regular basis. To use an industry term, ts somewhat “static.” We should point out that your blog tool uses a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to push the article content out to subscribers. Because of your blog tool and its RSS capability, you now have the opportunity to feed content from specific categories to various pages throughout your site. For example, the content from your ”Press Release” section can be fed into your website ”News” section. A section of this page could be title “Latest Press Releases” and the user would see, for example, the three most recent article titles posted in your blog’s Press Release section. Clicking a title brings up the whole article in your blog. You now have the ability to bring fresh content to every page on your website!

You now have a blog and fresh content pushing out into your website, but people don’t always come to your website looking to see what’s new do they? The RSS function in your blog is one way to allow them to subscribe to your blog and get the updates, but let’s push it a little farther out and see what we can do with Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account, you should create them. In Facebook, you can create your own account, but then build a Fan Page or Group for your company and assign yourself or an employe who also has a Twitter account as Admin. In Twitter, you can create an account specifically for your company. Here’s where things start to appear tedious and you envision yourself and your employees logging in and writing in the blog, then logging in and writting in Facebook, then logging in and writting in Twitter, etc… We have been successful in integrating tools that will automatically pull your blog articles into your Twitter and Facebook accounts, thus giving you one central location to manage all content. Facebook is slightly different in that you will still want to log in periodically and write/respond to followers, but this gives you a much more streamlined workflow for daily operations.

You now have the following benefits:

1. Increased search engine rankings
2. Visitors to subscribe to your feeds and get updates every time you post something in the blog
3. Fresh content fed from blog to various sections of website
4. Facebook and Twitter accounts with fresh content fed from blog
5. One location to post content

Look for “Web Marketing After SEO – Step 3″ in the coming weeks!

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Nelson & Co. is a Sugar Land, Texas based graphic design firm serving the Greater Houston area with turn-key print, multimedia and web design projects since 2002 and is proud to be listed in the Houston Business Journal’s Book of Lists as a Top 25 Graphic Design Firm serving corporate, mid-sized and even start-up businesses alike with powerful branding and marketing tools. For more information on Nelson & Co. visit www.nelsonandco.net or contact us at (713) 960-1511.

Nelson & Co.  •  2277 Plaza Dr. #250  •  Sugar Land, Texas 77479  •  713.960.1511

The biggest challenge with social marketing isn’t a subscription or even software purchase. Most venues (like blogging platforms, Facebook and Twitter) are free. The challenge comes with the realization that once you commit to doing these things, someone has to log into every one of these tools and update them on a regular basis. Though Nelson & Co. does offer copywriter services, an ongoing expense is still a major consideration. But what if you could distribute the task among your current staff and still have final control over what ultimately goes out? Well , you can and in our opinion it all starts with your blog!

Nelson & Co. has been implementing WordPress installations for their clients for over three years now and has also helped customers with existing Blogger accounts.  We believe this is the launching point for your Social and viral marketing. Considering that Google bought Blogger, its not hard to see that Google does too. Blog tools allow you to create categories for various topics such as Press Releases, Upcoming Events, Product Updates, Tips and Tutorials, etc. You can set up different employees as Writers for a specific category then assign a recurring Outlook Task or Calendar Item to remind them of their deadlines…say ‘The 1st Friday of every month.” When they write the articles, they post them, but can’t publish them or take them live. You, or an assigned Editor, gets an email saying the article is ready to review and take live!

Blogs typically come with a feature called RSS, which allows people to subscribe to your postings and be updated everytime you post something. As we’ll discuss in later articles within the “Web Marketing After SEO” series, you will also be able to push the content out to websites through this tool.

A blog tool is a great first step to going Social. This one step alone will:

1. Increase your search engine rankings
2. Allow visitors to subscribe to your feeds and get updates every time you post something in the blog
3. Sets the ground work for the rest of your Social and Viral marketing program

Look for “Web Marketing After SEO – Step 2″ in the coming weeks!

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Nelson & Co. is a Sugar Land, Texas based graphic design firm serving the Greater Houston area with turn-key print, multimedia and web design projects since 2002 and is proud to be listed in the Houston Business Journal’s Book of Lists as a Top 25 Graphic Design Firm serving corporate, mid-sized and even start-up businesses alike with powerful branding and marketing tools. For more information on Nelson & Co. visit www.nelsonandco.net or contact us at (713) 960-1511.

Nelson & Co.  •  2277 Plaza Dr. #250  •  Sugar Land, Texas 77479  •  713.960.1511

The team members at Nelson & Co. have been doing web marketing since 1999, which is like saying “forever” when considering the speed at which technology evolves. In recent years, new tools have become available to internet marketers allowing them to take web marketing to a new level, one that gives them some control in contrast to the old SEO methods: optimize … submit … wait … evaluate … and repeat.  That’s not to say the old ways aren’t relevant anymore, because they are. There are fundamental things to consider when seeking “organic” search results, and a good basic SEO program can take you far. Now, however, there are other options for getting “the word out.”

By now, everyone is well aware of the social media craze that’s as fincky as the trendy restaurant scene in Anytown, USA. MySpace, facebook and Twitter have all opened our eyes to other means of communication and networking. Years ago, Google laid it out for everyone; they said there needed to be links to and from your site, and fresh content. This started the link sharing craze, which really doesn’t help a site in the long run. Sharing a bunch of links with irrelevant sites and strangers wasn’t part of the master plan; It was more of a parlor trick. What does work is feeding your content out to other websites, news services, and your customers….diseminating it to the masses. RSS (Really Simple Sindication) was the answer. With RSS, someone can write an article like this one and push it out to the world instead of putting something on your site and expecting someone else to come check your site for something new and interesting. This technology bred a new kind of search engine, a content agregator. Sites like feedburner collect rss feeds and propogate them out to subscribers searching for related content.

Nelson & Co. offers its clients WordPress, a news/blogging application, that once installed, skinned and configured, gives a website owner the ability to write fresh content for their site and categorize it. One category can be organized for press releases, while another focusses on industry information or product reviews. This contet can be used in so many ways. Through the Nelson & Co. web marketing and maintenance program, these postings become listed in the news aggregator sites and get picked up by individuals, other sites and even news agencies. The content dates and titles can even be pulled to various sections of the client’s website offering fresh content and teasers throughout. A third benefit is that this content can also be fed into a clients facebook, MySpace and twitter pages…if you don’t have one already, Nelson & Co. can help you with that as well. Finally, the fresh content gives search engines something to list, and better exposure is a GOOD THING.

By considering these new marketing avenues, companies will maximize their marketing dollar, improve their site’s interest (stickyness), and gain the exposure needed to stay in front of their customer.

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Nelson & Co. is a Sugar Land, Texas based graphic design firm serving the Greater Houston area with turn-key print, multimedia and web design projects since 2002 and is proud to be listed in the Houston Business Journal’s Book of Lists as a Top 25 Graphic Design Firm serving corporate, mid-sized and even start-up businesses alike with powerful branding and marketing tools. For more information on Nelson & Co. visit www.nelsonandco.net or contact us at (713) 960-1511.

Nelson & Co.  •  2277 Plaza Dr. #250  •  Sugar Land, Texas 77479  •  713.960.1511