1. The Importance of Google – 80% of all searches being conducted thru Google, so it is crucial to focus primarily on this search engine. Yahoo and Bing aren’t as important but still are an important part of search engine marketing.
2. Pick the Right Keywords & Phrases – Choose keywords that are relevant to your business and rank easily. Look for multi-word phrases or ‘long-tail keywords’ as they are usually less competitive
3. Social Media – Focus on the top three social media venues: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Remember, ‘be real’ and ‘be there’ to help the community rather than to push products.
4. Effective Landing Pages - Everything that has been done to draw qualified traffic to a site, from improving SEO, to generating great content comes to a head in the landing page. Leads should be confronted with an inescapable case for them to leave their carefully guarded personal information on the form. Having one offer, recapping benefits, and a short form are all key.
5. Calls-to-Action – A landing page will not be effective without obvious calls to action. It’s important to provide something of value that solves a problem for visitors  in exchange for their contact information. Even if your audience isn’t ready to purchase they may be willing offer their information in exchange for more insight into your product or service.
6. Content is King - Prospects are more likely to buy from you if you are a thought leader, so establish yourself as one by creating extraordinarily helpful content. Take decisive action to ensure prospective customers are attracted to your site as a place to find answers.
7. Charity is Also King – Another key part to attracting customers is your generosity in giving away information, access to tools, etc., which also earns you inbound links which improves your search engine rankings.
8. Follow Ups – “Thank you” emails go a long way to generating future leads. Be sure to include additional free offerings– this is a free opportunity to keep touch with a lead.
9. Tracking Analytics – Effective Inbound Marketing is all about experimentation. Select a strategy based on experience with customers and industry to get people to both visit and convert on the website. But anticipate that initial assumptions about keywords, or what it takes to get traffic to convert will not be right (or not right enough) and changes will need to be made. For this reason, it is essential to have a complete internet analysis tool-suite to help figure out what’s working and what’s not.

For more information on how we can help with your Online Marketing efforts contact us now.

On Sunday, Feb. 3, more than 100 million fans will tune in to Superbowl XLVII as the Baltimore Ravens take on the San Francisco 49ers. In fact, the Superbowl has historically been the most watch event every year. The pressure to design the creative assets for the game every year cannot be underestimated. Fortunately, NFL Creative Director Shandon Melvin was gracious enough to take time out of his enormously overwhelming week to give HOW an insider’s view of the design strategy of the annual NFL Superbowl. He is our hero.

1. Is all work for the Super Bowl materials handled by a dedicated in-house design team?

No. There is an unbelievable amount of creative work developed for the Super Bowl and it takes hundreds of designers to pull it off. They specialize in creating everything from apparel to signage to tv graphics. Our in-house team creates a visual language through a Super Bowl style guide that the designers build from. Then we carry it out ourselves with League-related materials like the stadium decor and environmental graphics throughout the host city.

2. How large is the design team?

The internal creative team totals 34. We’re made up of 4 art directors, 13 designers, 3 photographers, 2 production artists, 3 quality control specialists, 4 project managers and 4 brand managers. Each one of them is incredibly talented, very smart, and dedicated to the brand. The quality of their work blows me away and every single day I’m reminded how blessed I am to be a part of this team.

3. Is the team located at NFL Headquarters?

We are, and it is such a huge advantage to the team. About 10 years ago the League made a commitment to focus on the brand. They knew the best way to do this was to have a centralized brand and creative discipline working alongside the other key operations in New York at the League headquarters.

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Want to be a better online marketer this year? Here are five resolutions you should definitely keep.

January is the time of self-reflection, good intentions, and reality checks. Want to hit the ground running and be a better online marketer this year? Here are five New Year’s resolutions that will help you hit your growth goals in 2013:

1. Send more marketing e-mails.
This is probably the simplest and most effective way to drive traffic to your website, increase repeat sales, and build a relationship with customers.  But it is amazingly overlooked. If you’re like most businesses, you use e-mail to send periodic newsletters, announce product launches or events, and promote occasional sales and specials. That’s not nearly enough. You should be regularly communicating with customers. Once a week is a rule of thumb minimum–twice a week is better. And make sure you are sending fresh, simple, digestible content.

2. Create two pages of content per week.
Adding new pages to your website every week will go a long way in boosting your search engine rankings. One of the most important factors that Google takes into account when determining SEO rankings is the frequency of fresh, relevant, unique content being added to your site. So in 2013, add two pieces of fresh content to your site each week. This can take the form of a blog post, a Q&A with an expert, a resources section, or just additional pages to your website. Keeping this resolution will absolutely have a positive impact on your site in the eyes of Google.

3. Create content for distribution, too.
The content on your website is only half of the battle when it comes to improving your SEO. The other factor is getting links to your website. The best way to accomplish this is by creating great, share-worthy content (such as infographics, articles, or videos) at least once a quarter, and distributing this content to bloggers, industry sites, and partners. Doing this helps with branding, builds goodwill, and boosts traffic and those all-important in-bound links that make all the difference in SEO, especially in competitive industries.

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All throughout 2012 there has been an enormous surge in new web design trends. Some of you may remember my earlier post on web design trends going into 2012. Now we can see many of these ideas have come to fruition, and even adopted further increasing levels of novelty. In this article I would like to delve into 20 more design trends for the new 2013 year.

The design influence is merely a reflection of our culture and expectations for user interfaces. Ideally these trends represent favorable ideas in the web design community. However designers will always have their own opinions when it comes to design terms, so take these ideas with a grain of salt.

If you are interested, keep your eyes peeled for examples of these trends and techniques.

1. Responsive Layouts

This topic was my first point in the 2012 trend article, however I feel that responsive web design has been changing to ultimately come to a threshold where layouts are designed to match all forms of digital media. The idea is to support all devices from laptops, desktops, smartphones, tablets, and anything released in the future.

You could think of this trend more like a uniform web design where the goal is to have a single set of codes which run perfectly on all environments. Responsive websites are often thought to cater towards mobile browsers, but that isn’t the sole purpose.

You can have a responsive website which also adds brilliant illustrations and graphics into the layout when the browser window is larger.

The big idea here is to think about website design as a single canvas which is dynamic and fluid by nature. CSS3 media queries allow developers to customize layouts based on limited or expanded screen real estate. Use this to your advantage and see how other designers are using it as well!

2. Retina Support

Along with responsive support for website layouts I have also seen a dramatic rise in people building for retina devices. Apple first engineered this idea with the iPhone 4 and has since applied this screen display onto their other devices, including the iPad and some MacBooks.

Retina screens are basically twice as dense as any average LCD. So they are the same number of physical pixels, but digitally twice as many pixels can be fitted into the same physical space.

This means pixel-perfect web designers supporting retina devices will need to create two sets of http://media02.hongkiat.com/web-design-trend-2013/. First you need to sample your image at double the resolution, then save a “standard” version at half the size. The larger image will be scaled down to the standard resolution and will look very crisp on retina screens.

One of my favorite tools for responsive web design is retina.js. This is a JavaScript library forautomatically displaying @2x retina copies of image whenever your user is browsing on a retina device.

Although this won’t detect CSS background image, it is still the most handy resource as opposed to coding everything in media queries.

Using the CSS position: fixed; property is a great way to staple a header bar onto your website. As visitors scroll down your page this will offer constant support for navigation and a trip back to the home page. This trend has been around for a while but now we are seeing this in full force.

Fixed headers are so interesting because they can work on practically any website. This includes social networks, blogs, and even design studios or private companies. The design is very trendy and looks great paired with most layouts. But aside from the aesthetics, this bar also provides an exceptional user experience without needing to look very far to navigate the website.

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A century ago “Black Friday” referred to the market crash of Sept. 24, 1869, which was caused by two financiers’ failed attempt to corner the gold market. Today we know Black Friday as the country’s busiest shopping day, falling right after Thanksgiving. How did that happen?

One popular but false explanation is that the name marks the day retailers end an 11-month stretch of red ink and harvest profits for the first time all year. Others say it refers to the dark day thousands of retail workers will spend greeting shoppers, stocking shelves, folding garments, and ringing registers.

In fact, factory owners in the 1950s first coined Black Friday to lament the high number of workers who wouldn’t show up for work, as linguist Ben Zimmer pointed out last year. The connection between Black Friday, crowds, and shopping came in the early 1960s from some Philadelphia cops, he explained. They used the phrase to describe the mad traffic downtown on the day holiday shoppers converged with football fans arriving for the Army-Navy game, traditionally played in Philly on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

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One subject that I always excelled at was math. No equation was left unanswered and every problem was solved. But I never thought that math and algorithms could be applied to marketing. But an article by TANZINA VEGA of the NY Times explains there’s a new equation so Web marketing success. Take a read..

Publishers and broadcasters have long tried to offer advertisers the right audience for their products. Want to sell pick-ups to people who like sports? Buy ads at halftime during a football game. Selling luggage or airline tickets? Buy ads in the travel section of a newspaper or Web site.