Today I was felling a little uninspired because of the rainy weather. Then I came across Getty Image's Moodstream. It lets you create great mood boards consisting of a series of photos and videos all with a background of customized soundtracks. You pick the media to display using sliders describing the mood you prefer. For example happy vs sad or calm vs lively. I choose happy, lively, humorous. The images were superb and my mood was instantly turned around!

Mood boards have always been a great brainstorming tool. Mine used to consist of clippings from magazines. Now I can easily incorporate video and music and really be inspired.

The Girl Effect has a powerful video (Youtube Link) with a very meaningful message. I love the site and the brand. Beautifully done.

Lately just as I discover a great blog and subscribe, the next post is about how the publisher doesn’t have the time to maintain it anymore. So it’s ending.

This has led me to think about what is the professional and polite way to end a blog and still keep your readers happy.

1. Explain why your ending the blog. Be honest and truthful even its for bad reasons. I recently met someone who abruptly ended her blog because a post didn’t help her land a job. Even though she had plenty of readers, she decided that disappointing one reader to that extreme justified a quick shut down.
2. Let your readers know how long you will be offline. If you think you might decide to come back online later, let them know. If this is a permanent decision, let them know that too.
3. Leave the existing content for your readers if you can. Readers will still refer back to your posts if you leave them. You can put some Google Ads on your site to help cover the costs.
4. Recommend other blogs that are similiar. Point your readers in another direction will not only make them happy but also please a few other bloggers too.
5. Let them know if they can find you elsewhere online. If it’s a LinkedIn profile, Twitter, or any other online space, let them know (if you feel comfortable about it).

Our London trip was filled with plenty of highlights. One of which was a graffiti art exhibit by Banksy called "The Cans Festival". A disused road tunnel on Leake Street under Waterloo Station in South London was turned into a giant free exhibition with works from Banksy and 29 other artists.

The work is amazing and best of all free. We took a hunded pictures and uploaded most to Flickr. If you happen to be in London, I would highly recommend it. And if you have a bit of spray paint, don't be shy about adding your own touch.

Tomorrow I'm off to London to visit my old stomping ground, see friends & family. If you fancy keeping up with me while I'm away, you can follow me on Twitter. We're only there for a week but have a superb line up of events for those few days. I can't wait to be back in the hood visiting all my old haunts. It's going to be an absolute blast!

One myth I would like to clear up is that online marketing isn’t just for businesses with big marketing budgets. The truth is that anyone can afford to promote their business online. Even the smallest shops can start today for free.

Outlined below are some of the basic costs involved. This is in no way an online marketing strategy, but it’s a way to get started.

What’s all Involved

Purchasing a web address

If you’re new to online marketing, the first thing you need is a web address. You can purchase one from Godaddy for around $10 a year.

Hosting

You need a place to put your site. Hosting costs can vary significantly depending on your needs. It can run you anywhere from $5 a month on upwards. Looking for a dedicated server hosted on an island outside of western IT laws? Call me.

Content and Design

The options here are unlimited. Agencies will differ depending on their techniques. Some won’t touch a site unless they have $20K budget. Others will pull something together for you for around $300.

The “Aston Martin” of sites invest in researching keywords and creating engaging content. They do a ton of research upfront before they even start on the design. It costs more, but in the end you get design and content that works.

At the other end of the spectrum are free templates available all over online. Some are visually very cool. You can plug your content into a template & hope it fits. It will probably come out more like a used Chevy with Ford bumpers, which can look very cool depending!

The cheapest option is to get a Facebook or Myspace page. At the very minimum, this gives you a place where you can put your contact details and promote your business.

SEO & Marketing

The website is worthless if no one can find it. So it pays to invest in an SEO and online marketing strategy. The prices here range and are worth what you invest into it. In fact, the costs should pay for themselves.

Again, this isn’t just for the fat cats. Mom & pops can start promoting themselves through Twitter updates. They can also create free blog on Blogger or Wordpress. Other great marketing promotion spots are YouTube and Flickr.

Ongoing Maintenace

Sites take love and care just like a garden. You need to monitor the stats. An excellent tool for this is Google Analytics. It’s worth it to pay someone to do this for you and strategize how to level the wealth of information available.

You also have to make sure the content is up to date and you’re using the latest keywords. Again, this takes time and research.

Proof is in the Pudding

Or should a say in the pizza? If you still need convincing of a good online marketing strategy, just take a look at what Papa John’s was able to achieve with the internet & pizza. Over $1 billion onlines sales. Cha-ching!

It then went on to describe what motivates each generation. Because I love pictures, I matched an image from Stock.xchng with the descriptions to give it another level of substance. It would be interesting to compose the same list based on geographic locations and culture.  

Silent Generation: respect for authority; conformity and adherence to the rules; law, order and duty; dedication, hard work and sacrifice.

Baby Boomers: personal gratification; personal growth, health and wellness; optimism and positive attitude; teamwork and being involved. 

Generation X: diversity and global thinking; self-reliance and independence; life balance; fun and informal attitude; technologically literate.

Generation Y: confidence and achievement; sociability and collective action; diversity and morality; street-smart; optimistic and savvy.

What makes Sioux Falls so popular? First is the wonderfully low taxes. There are no state corporate or personal income taxes, and no personal property, inheritance or inventory taxes. Sales tax is just under 6%, and the total of taxes residents pay is among the lowest in the country.

The second reason is the low cost of startup. It costs an estimated 45% less to open a business here than in New York.

Having launched a business in London, I realize just how powerful this can be for competitive pricing. It’s far more cost effective to hire someone in Sioux Falls than it is on one of the coasts.

The greatest drawback listed was that Sioux Falls is “a long drive from major cities.” And with the airport dropping flights, it’s getting harder to get around. So winning those top clients outside of the region is a lot trickier.

No. 1 on the list was Bellevue, Wash. Sioux Falls ranked between Oro Valley, Ariz. and Madison, Wis.

A little bit of inspiration for your Monday morning. I came across this photo in Smashing Magazine. They has a collection of (really) stunning pictures and photos. The collection of images is a great start to the week.

Usability

You can incorporate the SEO tricks around, but your site will still have to justify that it’s “deserving” of top rankings. Search engines’ goals are to rank the best, most usable, functional and informative sites first.

You have only a few seconds to make that initial first impression great and stop visitors from hitting that back button. How do you do this? Don’t make your users think.

1. Test your site on real users. Define a set of optimal task you’d like your visitors to achieve at your site and test them out on people who actually use your site. If the goal of your site is to sell kites, sit down a user and ask them to try to purchase a certain type of kite & see how successful they are.
2. Stick to design standards. Underlined links, top and side menu bars, logos in the top left corner should be adhered to. Make use of white space and keep your style consistent through out the site. Don’t try to be clever because it will only confuse your visitors and they will go away quickly.
3. Organize and label your site as your users would expect. Use an language that is understood by your visitors and categorize topics as they would expect them to be, not how they are categorized inside your organization. The architecture is strongly effects usability.
4. Navigate easily from top levels to deeper pages. Navigation is one of the sites primary functions so provide users with obvious navigation systems such as breadcrumbs, image alt tags, and well written anchor text on your links. Be sure to use visual clues that indicate the user will be leaving the site. Users want to know where they’re going and how to easily return to a page.
5. Provide quality content. This is where all web development should start. Too often they begin with a design and how the site will look. But content should drive the design. Copyblogger is a site that has everything you need to know about writing excellent copy.
6. Create pages that load fast and function as intended. Nothing will ruin a site faster than one that doesn’t even load. Just as bad is a site that loads, but doesn’t work. It’s filled with broken links, forms that don’t function, or missing images.
7. Make your site accessible to everyone. Run tests to validate your site is accessible to disabled or impaired users. Not only does it widen your market, if your content is accessible to them it’s also accessible to spiders and bots.
8. Invest in a professional user-centered-design. If you hire a web agency to create a site for you, make sure they design it using user-centered-design practice. How do you know? They’ll do some research upfront before showing you and designs. Research includes:
   • create personas about your target market
   • test your existing site on real users
   • create prototypes & to test on users
   • developing a site architecture and wire-frames
   • complete a content audit
   • do a card sort activity

   All this is done upfront before they show you pretty colors and exciting fonts and pictures. If they start with a pretty design, beware. And if you can’t invest in a design agency, then get yourself a copy of Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

9. Offer goodies and make it worth their time. In SEO terms, this is called Link Bait. A single exciting piece of content that gets picked up en masse across the internet is worth a small fortune in public relations and exposure. And can sty with your site for a long time, providing search visibility long after the event itself has been forgotten. Below are a few ideas. you can also find a few more on Carla Kay White’s blog How to Create Link Love.
   • Create Freebies like Wordpress themes, Desktop wallpaper, icons, images, tools. Whatever matches your product base or service offering.
   • Guest Blog on other sites. Or get someone from your industry to blog on your site.
   • Create a contest. Sites do well with this. The prize doesn’t need to be big but it will spread rapidly.
   • Interview Well-known Insiders. Even just a short interview or an email is great.

In today’s market, the trend is word-of-mouth over pushing advertising. You want people to link to your site because it’s worth the visitors time and they want to pass it along to friends and colleagues. If you don’t invest in a design that works for the user, they won’t invest more than 7 seconds on your site. They have billions to choose from and will go somewhere else.

What Next?

Next: Growing Link Love & Your Site’s Popularity (coming soon)

Lesson One: Search Engine 101 and How they Work

Lesson Two: Six Steps to Effective Keyword Search

Lesson Three: 10 Questions for Site Optimization

Back to SEO for Beginners.