Mobile websites are becoming more and more popular as the use of Smartphones picks up at a fast pace.

But one big question is – how do you design a mobile website?

I’m going to explain very quickly the elements you need in order to make a mobile website design functional and easy to use for your visitors.

Your main website colors can be incorporated into your design as can your main logo or graphic header. The point of a mobile website is to make it as quick-loading and simplistic as you can. The first step is to make sure the header graphic you use is re-sized to fit a mobile screen.

In regards to information, I recommend you take only the most vital information and actually have some simple tabs or menu items for each section on the front page of your mobile website. What you have listed depends on your business, but don’t forget, you don’t need every tab showing on the front page.

By all means list categories on the front which lead to other pages on your mobile website. This will make the mobile website easier to use for visitors.

You should, without a doubt, place your contact information on the mobile site as well as all the places you are listed on social media, such as, – Twitter, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn, and not forgetting a link to the desktop version of your website. A touch to call button is a nice touch so visitors can call you right away.

Important Tip: Keep your mobile website simple.

When it comes to content, you don’t want to fill each page with a novel’s worth of writing: Keep it simple and straight to the point. Remember, users are reading your message on a very small screen.

Additionally, you can add an opt-in newsletter, but consider making a separate menu item for this such as ‘news and offers’; that way your website won’t look cluttered.

These few tips should get you thinking about what belongs on a mobile version of your website and what visitors can really use.

QR Codes Inspire Curiosity

QR codes are really enticing for people to scan and find out more, but sometimes you have to be a little creative with where you place them and what you do with them.

1. Put them on merchandise such as t-shirts and hats. This is a great way to take your QR code on the move with you. Strangers can’t resist scanning these codes so be prepared if you should happen to be wearing a shirt or hat with the code on – you may have a few people point their Smartphones at you to see where your QR code leads them.

2. Use QR codes on stickers. Have you ever given money to someone with a charity box and in return you get a sticker? Yes its old school but some charities and fundraising individuals still do it. What happens with the sticker? It’s normally discarded very quickly. Why make a QR code that directs people to the charity or fundraiser website.

3. Put QR codes on sales tags for clothes or tangible goods to explain more about the product. This really helps when you are low on staff but don’t want to lose customers. You can place little how-to scan cards on the counter or around the store, so people know how what to do in order to maximise the use of your QR codes.

4. Use QR codes on temporary tattoos. Yep you can go for a real one if you’re dare, after all some people have, but I suggest temporary tattoos are a fun way to get attention – especially at the weekend when you’re out with your friends – flash that tattoo and get think scanning your skin. Its fun, different and it will get you attention both online as well as on the mobile web.

5. Put QR codes on billboards. If your budget allows you to put advertising on medium size billboards then you can really get a lot of clicks to your mobile website. Now before you scoff at this idea, you’d be surprised how cheaply you can hire a billboard out for a short term to place the code on it. This form of marketing is best used when you have an amazing offer going on.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas of how to market with QR codes, and don’t forget QR codes don’t have to be black and white. Hire a designer to customize them for you. This makes them even more fun to use, and they’ll really stand out.

Meet Your Readers Where They Are with an Email List

Not all of your readers will find you through your blog or your website. In fact, many of your readers and potential customers will learn about you through word of mouth from friends and relatives. Those helpful friends and relatives may find it easiest to simply forward your newsletter, earning you some new readers once they sign up. Through your emails and newsletters, these new customers will eventually find their way back to your website or blog which they may not have done otherwise.

Targeted Audience

Your email list is full of people who are interested in what you have to say. You don’t have to worry about the hard sell with them, because they know you and your product and want to know what the latest information is. Your email list is also a valuable mine of feedback. These are the people whose opinions you care most about, and you have them as a captive audience.

Become an Authority & Leverage Your Expertise to your Email List

With your email list, you are now an expert in your field. Leverage that fact and bring your readers experts and information they can really use. Once your readers trust the information you bring them, your list will grow by leaps and bounds. Remember that your readers will share powerful information with their friends and families. An authoritative expert is far more likely to have their newsletters and email shared than someone who fails to leverage their expertise.

About Google Places

Google Places is a free service owned by Google itself. It serves free listings of commercial or non-commercial organizations. Free listings include the organization’s name, full contact details, and business type with a geographical map and much more. You can see the location of the business on a map making it a great marketing tool for local businesses.

Benefits Of Google Places To Your Business

Using Google Places is one of the best methods to promote your business on the Google search engine. Google enables business owners to list their name and all important details on Google Places free of charge. However, there are some specific details that a person needs to know to make the listing show up on page one and stay there. While searching, a list of local businesses are displayed on the screen with complete contact details and a map.

Visitors may click on relevant links of organizations to get more details about them. Having your relevant website or blog details there is critical so that people can go to your site to learn more. From a sales and promotion point of view, it has become essential that your business be listed in Google Places.

Let’s look at an example of how a user will find information on Google Places. If someone types “Chinese Food Mahnattan”, it will pull up all of the local information on Chinese food restaurants in the area of Manhattan along with a map and contact information.

It might sound like you can just head over to Google Places right now to input your information and get on page one. Unfortunately, that is no longer true. Now that so many business owners know how important it is, the service has become highly competitive.

In order to get to the top of the Google Places rankings, you need to create your listing in a very specific way. We can help you do that! Just contact us or give us a call today so that we can claim your spot.

Three ways to market your business online:

Facebook

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites in the world. Any social media marketing effort for your business that does not include Facebook will be incomplete. Facebook has expanded the ways you can market your business online on their site and introduced a classified ads listing service called “Marketplace”; the “Beacon” which allows subscribers to monitor Facebook user’s activities on partner sites; and also introduced the use of polls which allow a business to conduct intro areas such as new products and customer satisfaction. Plus, you can use Facebook Ads to serve up information to customers by demographic.

Twitter

A business owner can market inexpensively and effectively through Twitter. It is a great place to network with other business owners, customers, and potential customers. It is very simple and easy to get your message out there by posting a short 140 character tweet. Search engines recognize your business tweets, which increases exposure for your organization and draws in new customers.

LinkedIn

The popularity of LinkedIn is growing and should be one of the social media outlets you access as a business owner for your online marketing strategy. LinkedIn is a site where business associates can connect and share services and contacts. It has a much more professional feel and look to it than the other social networking sites. Anyone who is serious about establishing themselves as a serious business will use LinkedIn in their social media marketing efforts.

Market your business online for exposure and profit

By making full use of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you are well on your way to increasing online exposure for your business and growing your customer base. If you feel overwhelmed by setting up social media campaigns to market your business online, contact us today as that is our speciality!

What does an online marketing expert have that I don’t?

An online marketing expert has access to complex and highly analytical software programs that can complete a host of marketing related tasks for your company. These software programs know where to go to look for potential customers for your company based upon where they spend their time online.

Not only can an online marketing expert find your company potential customers, they can also work to track how many times these customers visit your website, how many of them make a purchase, and how many of them come back to purchase from your company multiple times. This information is invaluable to a company’s marketing and sales strategies. Do you know how to set up such in depth analytics yourself?

An online marketing expert can also offer you helpful advice about how to access social media for business to get your message out there. This can include tips on how to gain exposure for your website or blog, and how to keep these visitors returning and purchasing your services or products. A satisfied customer will spread links to your website or business blog through social networking sites, increasing your company’s exposure even more. This amounts to free advertising for your company.

On the other hand, you can do it yourself when you have spare time. Unfortunately, that often means you will see lackluster results from your social media efforts as most business owners are way too busy to plan and implement a social media campaign every month.

Can an online marketing expert save me money?

If you tried to complete these tasks on your own, you would spend a fortune in money or time. Online marketing experts often offer bundled packages for marketing tasks that can save your company time and money. It makes good business sense to complete your marketing efforts in the most time and cost efficient method possible.

So, again the question is do you have a lot of extra time to spend on doing everything yourself? Can you afford not to hire an online expert? Think of all the time and frustration you’ll save.

If you are a business owner then SEO (search engine optimization) is vital for you to know, especially in today’s economy.

SEO is the foundation of an internet marketing campaign, and therefore it should be treated as importantly as a regular commercial campaign.

However, the internet is nothing like the media. The way that you prepare an online marketing campaign is quite different than simply running a time-limited ad in the local newspaper. What you put online is there for good.

You want people to be able to find your site among the billions of others that are online today.

SEO is the key to making this happen.

SEO is the foundation to your website because it is the actual source code structure of your website. In fact, every post you make should have certain SEO factors in mind. What keywords you use, how you describe your posts and even how many times you use a keyword should be mapped out.

TIP: When you are looking for a SEO expert to handle your website, make sure that the person is familiar with more than one aspect of SEO.

Search engines are structured to notice certain coding such as META tags, but they are only one part of the foundation to your website.

While considering SEO, you also want to have quality content that makes the visitor stick around to read it. This help your “bounce rate” which is another factor Google looks at when ranking your pages.

Typically, your blog posts should be around 350-800 words so that you have plenty of room for good information. Using images and pictures is also a must in today’s world because we have become very visual through TV and computers.

There are other simple SEO methods such as using bold and italics to highlight your keywords. You should also be using headlines of different sizes for greater readability and SEO.

These are just few of the subjects behind SEO 101, and as a business owner, you can either do this yourself or as recommended have a SEO expert is the greatest choice.

Of course, we would love to help so give us a call at 855-5-MUTINY or fill out our Contact Us form today!

The Web also provides tools such as e-mail, online exchange of good and services, international advertising, and so on which is useful and necessary for any business to be competitive. With online marketing comes great exposure, and with great exposure comes great opportunity for more revenue.

Branding Your Business with Online Marketing

The internet creates an illusion of “success” which is often called “branding.” Businesses acquire an image through online marketing on the internet, allowing them to become more widely-recognizable. Ebay, Facebook, Google, and Amazon are just a few examples of small businesses that are now house-hold names as a result of online marketing. However, there are thousands of unknown success stories and cases of small businesses that have been able to flourish by using the internet’s numerous and undeniable advantages in their online marketing campaigns.

Old-fashioned marketing mediums like television and radio can be useful, but are largely obsolete in the current era due to cumulative technological advances. Television, radio, and “print marketing”(columns,editorials,billboards etc.) are expensive and less effective in comparison to online marketing on the internet.

These recent technological advances have completely changed the way people do almost everything–from buying and selling goods to the ways in which we communicate–and subsequently the ways we are able to do business.

The cost of creating a website is almost nothing. In fact, with the immense exposure that results from expanding to the internet, website design services and online advertisements often quickly pay for themselves. Millions (and perhaps billions) of individuals use the internet each day, so the likelihood of finding people interested in what a business has to offer is far greater than that of all other marketing mediums combined.

The internet is the most efficient marketing tool currently available to businesses. Online marketing is cost-effective, efficient, world-wide, and an ideal marketing strategy waiting to be utilized.

Not just anyone should handle your online marketing campaigns.

Each business has to set up their own Internet online marketing campaign based upon buget and need. While some things can be done “on the cheap” by your very smart teenage son, it doesn’t mean that it will be done in a way that will work for your business. Simply having a blog or website does not make a business.

One great way to maximize your budget it by using social media management consistently and in the right way. Social media allows you to interact with people in real time and protect your reputation in the online world. It is one of the most effective ways of online marketing.

Want to know more about the specific options available to you when it comes to marketing online? Contact us today for a free, no-hassle consultation to see how much more successful your business can be taking advantage of online marketing.

Mobile phones have changed us.

It is undeniable that mobile phones have changed many aspects of our lives. They have replaced the wristwatch, the pocket diary, calendars, pocket radios, cameras… and the list goes on. The single most important aspect of mobile phones is the fact that people carry them everywhere they go. It makes the users available at almost all times, eliminating the problem of timing in advertising.

This reason explains the importance of using mobile phones for marketing. There is no other gadget in history that has come with the possibilities that are now available because of mobile phones. As long as you have the right phone number, you will be quite sure that the person you targeted will receive and read the message. The process is personal, unobtrusive, and very quick. In fact, research shows that most people have their mobile phones no more than 3 feet from them at any given time!

While mobile phone marketing may not give you the same geographical reach that other forms of media give, it nonetheless provides you with a greater success rate at getting your message to the target audience. You will not waste scarce resources on large uninterested audiences. Instead the message will get to the people you intend to speak to. It makes the whole marketing process very efficient.

Marketing with mobile phones is versatile.

You can use mobile marketing in many ways including sending out electronic coupons. You can also inform prospects and customers of upcoming sales, a change in your business hours or a new product or service.

The key to mobile marketing effectively is doing it with the right message, at the right time using the right approach. We can help you do just that. We have many programs available that take advantage of the way your customers use mobile to produce more repeat customers and profits for your business. Contact us today for a free consultation: We promise we won’t try to sell you on mobile website design or text message advertising- we just want you to know what your options are.