PLAYING IN TRAFFIC

Internet Marketing: What Works and What Doesn’t?

At Samson Media we practice what we preach.

We employ the same mix of email marketing, social media, search engine optimization, blogging, YouTube videos and other techniques to our own Internet marketing efforts as we offer to our clients.  It’s our way of trying things out to see what works and what doesn’t as a type of real-world testing lab.  Because as you probably know — the instruction manual for all of this is constantly be written, and rewritten, in real-time.  It’s a bit like changing the tires on a moving car using tools that are constantly evolving even as you use them.

As we approach the half-way mark for 2012 we’ll be exploring more closely what works for you and what doesn’t over the next series of blog posts . We’ll also share with you our own experiences and  results and explore some case studies and success stories to help you decide the right mix of Internet marketing tactics for YOUR business.

To help get us started, please take the brief 4-question survey below.  And keep your eyes on this space for updates as we explore this together.

Posted in Continuing Education, Marketing, Smart Business | No Comments »

The Best Event Calendar For WordPress

The All-in-one Event Calendar  is a very robust and versatile plugin for WordPress.

This free plugin, made by The Seed Network, a group of Canadian developers,  combines a clean visual design with a powerful set of features that have been designed with business, organizations and communities in mind.

All In One allows you to create one event and have it displayed on a few or a few thousand calendars with no extra work. This calendar is a powerful service for websites and bloggers that will make it easier for you to publicize events, courses and offerings with your colleagues, clients, and community.

Monthly calendar or agenda style views of the calendar are available and events can be filtered through customized categories and tags.

Other top features include: recurring events, easy sharing with Google Calendar, Apple iCal, MS Outlook and any other system that accepts iCalendar (.ics) feeds and embedded Google Maps.

We recently set it up for one of our clients, Next Generation Trust Services, and we were surprised at how easy it was to set up and configure.

ONE SMALL PROBLEM

The only issue we had is that the first expanded box is a fixed height so if your text goes over a certain character count (not sure what that number is) it gets cut off.  The only way we found around that was to modify the plugin code ourselves to add a scroll bar.

But other than that little issue, we found the All-in-one Calendar to be a perfect event planning plugin.  You can download it free through the regular plugin search function in your WordPress dashboard, or grab directly it at The Seed Network website.

Posted in Blogging, Website Design | 1 Comment »

Client Debuts New Book

Congratulations to our client Mark Riesenberg for launching his new book, “Brightening Your Life’s Path“, in both the Amazon Kindle Store and via the Amazon print on demand service Create Space.  The 162 page book started out as an ebook before being added to the Amazon Kindle store, Create Space and the main Amazon book store.

SamsonMedia set up all the accounts and configured and formatted the book for the various channels which the author now makes available on his website dedicated to promoting the book. 

By taking a multi-channel approach to distribution in an effort to increase book sales, SamsonMedia also set up the ebook version for sale via Smashwords, which placed the book for sale inside the Barnes & Noble Nook Store as well as on iTunes.

JOINING WITH WOODPECKER PRESS

SamsonMedia.net is now offering these multi-channel book marketing services in partnership with WoodPecker Press.  For more info on our Author Marketing Services, please click here.

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Another SEO Success Story

When Dwell Summit, a Breckenridge, Colorado, property management and long term leasing company wanted to get their brand new website, created by KL Creative Design, on page one of Google, SamsonMedia.net was glad to help.

This was actually a textbook example of how effective SEO can be for dominating local search.

The process began by determining which keyword phrases actually dovetailed with their business and services and out of those keywords which ones had enough monthly search volume to make them worth pursuing. After our research, we selected some keywords, such as property management services and several others and had the pages designed around those phrases with the right balance of keyword density, ALT tags and META tags (which still matter to some degree despite what you may have read).

After about two weeks, Dwell Summit is now in the top 5 organic search engine results for phrases such as property management services colorado out of over 22 MILLION results!

Sweet!

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A Conversation with Paul Gourhan About Branding

Paul Gourhan is a man who knows branding. 

Paul is the creative director at PMW.net and we both spoke at a recent event sponsored by the Passaic Economic Development Board where the topic was on social media marketing and the impact on business. 

Forever tuned into the power of brands and what makes them authentic, especially in this age of social media, Paul had this to say about why being an “authentic” brand is now more important than ever:

Posted in Marketing, Smart Business, Social Media Marketing | No Comments »