RealWebMarketing.net Designs New Web Sites for California DanceArts

New Web Sites Will Highlight Organization's Dance Instruction and Professional Dance Company

LA CANADA, CA: Real Web Marketing Inc. (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company, has completed designing three new web sites for California DanceArts and California Contemporary Ballet, located in La Canada, CA (http://www.caldancearts.com, http://www.calballet.com and http://www.snowqueenballet.com).

California DanceArts is a dance school offering everything from contemporary dance instruction to classical ballet, for beginner to the professional level. California Contemporary Ballet is a non-profit professional dance company that puts on several major original ballet productions per year, including "The Snow Queen" in mid-December. The school and company were founded by Aerin Holt.

Aerin Holt, Founder and Artistic Director of California DanceArts and California Contemporary Ballet, stated “I am very pleased with the work that Real Web Marketing did on re-designing my site. My intention was to have a very big, bold, and dramatic web site that really showed what we do visually. We reviewed the web sites of other top ballet schools and companies around the country, and I think the final product that we got rivals any of them."

John Eberhard, President of Real Web Marketing stated, “Coming from an artistic background myself, being a designer and formerly a full time musician, I enjoyed working with Aerin and creating a web site that highlights the creative work that she does."

All three sites are built using a similar design, where the entire background is taken up with a large photo of one of the school or company's activities, and each section of the site has a different background picture, giving a lot of visual variety to the sites. Plus the main text box and sidebar are partially transparent, allowing visitors to see the entire large background picture. And all the sites are built in Wordpress, allowing Holt to easily make changes to the content of the site.

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for 23 years. Real Web Marketing Inc. was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area and incorporated in 2011, and has clients all over the U.S. Services offered include web design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization (SEO), link building, social media marketing, local marketing, copywriting, article syndication, online PR, and video production.

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Real Web Marketing Designs New Web Site for West Coast Fab Inc.

New Web Site Highlights Company's Precision Sheet Metal Fabrication Services

RICHMOND, CA: Real Web Marketing Inc. (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company in Los Angeles, has completed designing a new web site for West Coast Fab Inc., a precision sheet metal fabrication company located in Richmond, CA, in the Bay area (http://www.westcoastfabinc.com). The site features an extensive photo gallery of samples of the company's products.

Tom Nelson, President and founder of West Coast Fab Inc., stated “I am very pleased with the work that Real Web Marketing did on re-designing our site. We wanted a site that was a lot more modern and dramatic. The new design accomplished that and it immediately communicates what our company does, and shows off our finished products and our facility."

John Eberhard, President of Real Web Marketing stated, “I enjoyed working with the folks at West Coast Fab. They obviously are a top sheet metal fabrication company and I wanted the site to reflect the level of quality that the company maintains."

West Coast Fab Inc. was founded in 1973. As a precision sheet metal manufacturing company, the company fabricates everything from enclosures to brackets, from chassis to panels, and faceplates to fixtures.  Their sole purpose is to provide our customers with the finest precision sheet metal fabrication possible. The company provides services to a variety of industries, including computer, lighting, entertainment, architectural, home improvement, automotive, sports and recreation, scientific, aerospace, military, marine, industrial, medical, semiconductor, communications, and construction.

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for 23 years. Real Web Marketing Inc. was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area and incorporated in 2011, and has clients all over the U.S. Services offered include web design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization (SEO), link building, social media marketing, local marketing, copywriting, article syndication, online PR, and video production.

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Building an Email List

by John Eberhard

Back around 12 years ago I did a lot of email marketing to rented email lists. Then we had the spam email explosion and that basically killed the rented email marketing universe, just because people were getting too much email.

I have never been in agreement with Seth Godin's idea that you must never email to anyone unless you have permission. A guy I used to work for said he thought it was easier to get forgiveness than permission, and I like that concept.

But on the other hand, it is good to build up a list of people who have contacted you and given you permission to send them email. Then they tend to be more accepting of and interested in your email when it comes.

So how do you build up an email list? Basically you have to put up multiple ways for people to contact you on your site, and offer them multiple things that they would want, where they have to give you their email to get it.

Unfortunately this takes a little time. But you need to formulate a strategy and implement it so that you can start building that list, because having a large email list is an incredible resource.

The point is that with a large email list, you can market to it on a regular basis for little to no money.

Building a List

The key to building a list is to offer things that people will respond to, giving you their email address.

1. Contact Forms on Your Services Pages: If you have various pages on your site talking about your products or services, put a form on each one of those pages so the person can contact you for more information. On my site I have forms for people to contact me regarding SEO, pay per click advertising, social media marketing, and so on. Then when someone fills out one of the forms, they get an automated email right away that tells them that they will automatically be subscribed to my newsletter, and they can opt out at any time.

1. Email Newsletter: Offer a free email newsletter subscription on your web site. This doesn’t have as much appeal as it used to because people are getting so many emails. But if you put together a good newsletter with good content and promote it, people will come. Of course you have to commit to writing and putting out the newsletter regularly.

1. Free Reports or White Papers: I have used this tactic successfully for a lot of companies. Come up with a topic that you think will resonate with your target public, write a snappy title, then write 1,000-2,000 words, and design it with a nice cover and some graphics. Put it in PDF format so you can email it to people for free. Your topic should be something that is directly aligned with your product or service, so that everyone reaching for it will be a possible prospect, now or later on. Then get the word out on various channels and offer the report for free, but of course require that they give you their contact info including email. Works great for consumers and business to business.

1. Software Demos: If you sell software, it is vital to offer a demo version of the software on your site, and this will get you more email addresses than you can shake a stick at, IF you are getting traffic.

I have sometimes seen companies have videos on their site and make people give their email to see the video. But generally I have not seen that work as well as offering people a white paper. Somehow the offer of a free report or white paper seems like more of a tangible item that people would receive, rather than just seeing a video.

What and How Often to Send

Once you build up hundreds or thousands of names, you can email to them on a regular basis. I would say that usually up to once a week is OK. More often than that and you will start to get a lot of askoffs.

Send them an email newsletter. I am sending mine out weekly now, and I get a steady stream of business from it. The main part of the newsletter should be some article giving advice or data of some value, but you can include ads or blurbs selling your products, and of course with lots of links to your web site and blog. You can have more than one article, or an article along with various news items about your company. But I have generally seen that one article is adequate content for a newsletter, along with some short blurbs and ads for your services. The article should be 300-800 words.

You can also come up with emails promoting special offers, new products, old products. You can also send out a press release announcing some new product or service whenever you start a new one.

How to Send

You can either send using an email program that sits on your computer desktop, or you can use one of the cloud based email services.

I used a product called Mass Emailer for years that is desktop based, but recently it just stopped working. I found a new product for desktop based emailing called Send Blaster, and that is working well for me. I create my HTML newsletters or emails in Dreamweaver, then send to my heart’s content.

There are also several online email services, including Constant Contact, iContact, Aweber and Mailchimp. Those are the most popular services. Constant Contact is perhaps the most well known, but I find it the worst in terms of giving you different options to do different things. I like Aweber the best and use it for most of my clients.

These services cost in the neighborhood of $20 per month at the beginning. You sign up, set up your list or lists, then create a web form, and put that onto pages of your web site. Some HTML knowledge is required to get it set up with your web site. Then to send something you log into your interface and either use one of their templates or upload a file you have created using Dreamweaver or some other web authoring program.

Also makes sure you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, with mainly consists of putting your physical address in the email, and having an opt-out option for people. And you have to remove anyone who asks off in 10 days.

Good luck with building up your email list.

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Copyrighted Content

by John Eberhard

I want to warn my readers about a new trend that is happening with regard to the Internet.

When content is copyrighted, such as written text and pictures, that means that the copyright owner has the sole right to use that content. And if someone else uses it, he has the right to demand that they stop using it, and he has the right to demand that the other person pay him money for each use of the copyrighted material.

Technically, a person who wants to copyright something has to fill out a copyright form and submit that to the Library of Congress. But for practical purposes, all they really need to do to be able to support their claim to a copyright for content on the web, is to put a notice on the bottom of the page that the page is copyrighted.

I have seen that many people think that they can “borrow” content from other web sites, by copying and pasting written text, or downloading photos or other graphics. And I know this practice is widespread.

Over the last two years I have seen several instances where a person or company did this – borrowed content from another web site - and then were later threatened suit by the original owner of the copyrighted content. And the monetary demands were not small. In most cases in the $2,000 range or more.

Owners of stock photography sites, where you pay a fee for the use of a copyrighted photograph, have been doing this for years, i.e. locating people who had used their photos without paying money, then demanding money from those people. But lately I have seen owners of other web sites taking the time to try to locate people who had used their copyrighted content, then hiring a lawyer to send that person a demand for money.

We could comment on why this is happening now. Maybe it has something to do with the state of economy. Who knows? But the point is that borrowing copyrighted content from other web sites has now become a very dangerous practice. Search engines make it relatively easy for someone to search for their written text content, or even for the names of photo files if the borrower did not change the file name.

So the upshot of all this is to realize that you CANNOT use written text or photo or graphic content from other web sites, whether they show a copyright notice or not.

Secondly, I recommend that anyone who has borrowed written text or graphics from other web sites, spend the time to search through and remove it from any of their online content. I am not a lawyer so if you think you have a potential liability, you might want to consult a specialized copyright attorney (they are not cheap).

Good News

The good news is that there are a number of sites where you can find free photos for use on your web sites and blog posts. I use a site called Stock Xchange (www.sxc.hu) which offers free stock photos and has a lot of content.

Over the past several years I have purchased a lot of photos from iStock Photo (www.istockphoto.com) because they started out with very low prices, usually $2-5 per photo. In the last year, however, they have started dramatically raising their prices. So I have not been too happy about that. Then lately I found a site called 123RF (www.123rf.com) which has lower prices like iStock did in the beginning.

There is also a concept called "creative commons" with photo sharing sites, where people can upload their photos and allow others to use the photos for commercial purposes. Flickr has a creative commons area, where you can download photos and use for commercial purposes. And there is a lot of content there.
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

Here is a helpful article on creative commons:
http://www.savingforsomeday.com/blog-law-posting-and-using-photos-on-photo-sharing-sites/

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