Just spent some time giving the Boulevard Condos website some love.  It is very easy to let websites go adrift after a project is finished, but with the age of this site (and several others in the Goodlife Team portfolio), plus the regular, highly targeted visitor traffic it does receive, doing the maintenance is worth while.  I specifically updated our Boulevard news pages to include all future updates about The Riverside Grove, and also tied in our property searching on the site to answer the number one question people ask about when they do find the site – “what is currently for sale or lease?”.  Now all condos for sale or lease at 1201 Grove are easily visible.

The Riverside Grove

The Riverside Grove website also has updates coming.  We’ve had plenty to do with the Riverside Grove facebook pages, and also with preparing for the Riverside Grove grand opening event – stay tuned for more on the project!

East Austin Online

I’m looking forward to our work with the folks over at East Austin Online.  They’ve done a great job on having their site rank for just about every term I can think of related to living in East Austin, which is fantastic.  Plus they’re just great people that want to see the East side of Austin do well.  It’s excellent when you find like minded folk that are willing to do the work to promote something they believe in!

Modern Home Tour Austin

Finally – I’m working on a series of updates for the Modern Home Tour Austin website and facebook pages.  Stay tuned for these as we prepare to another great tour in 2011!

This is a diagram that I created early last year to explain what is being called the “Starfish”, the multiple tentacles that extend into different user contexts and that lead them back to your website where they are captured.

I’m developing a list of all the places that I think it makes sense to place your tentacles – some are mentioned in this diagram, and some I’m still collecting information about.  There are a lot of places you *can* show up on the Internet, and it helps to have evaluated the value of some places over others in terms of traffic and audience.

Click here for the article about the starfish social media concept on Robert Scoble’s blog.

I hope you had a great holiday and a happy new year!

Jack

So, last night I spent the evening at an event sponsored by a small, will-not-be-mentioned software company.  They obviously had spent big bucks to sponsor this event, and the event organizers to their credit made a point of mentioning the sponsors several times during the show.

I left the show interested in the company, and wanting to find out more today I went to Google and typed in their name.

Nothing but pages of non-relevant results.

I tried their name, plus “software”, plus even more detailed descriptions of things I saw promoted.

No dice.  Nada.  Can’t find ‘em.

From my perspective, they might have just as well burned the money they spent on the event.  Since there were no trinkets handed out with their URL on it, I really have no good way to find out about them.

My best guess is they have some fancy website made all in flash, with little or no search engine readable text anywhere to be found.  Plus, their company name did not lead me to an obvious url to type in – so I’m just one more potential buyer, adrift and unlikely to purchase.

UPDATE:

I did find their site after a few more guesses at their domain name – and voila, a fancy flash website with only a few keywords in the meta tags.  Once I found that, I did see that they could be found by an obvious variation on their name – one word instead of two, i.e. “softwarecompany” vs. “software company”, but it makes you wonder how many hits they are missing from people that make this mistake.  Obvious take away – more key phrases (exact matches and close ones), more text, more find-ability.

I will be forwarding them a copy of this blog entry, and a referral to a company I work with that does search engine visibility.  In this day and age, a business can’t be hard to find online, and even a few small tweaks make a difference.

BTW, Great show guys!  Thanks for supporting the local arts scene in Austin!

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=3082

This article is about whether or not to demand consumer information before delivering content- more food for thought in the lead generation vs. brand building/identity building argument over delivery of web content.

This is a pay-for article:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.cfm?currentID=3119

Basically, the sum up on it is: move your contact data capture to the bottom of the form.  They have done tests and shown that if people fill out information in the form (about the home they want to sell or buy, a credit eval, etc) and you put the contact information capture at the bottom you are more likely to get the lead than if you put it at the top.  The personal information capture at the top scares people away.