By Maureen Nolan. . . . My new website was designed and created by Judi Knight, of New Tricks. Judi also designed my new personal avatar and gave me marketing refocus by creatively branding my Atlanta ADHD coaching practice to be Your Attention Coach. Judi is fun to be around during idea and web design, an experience enhanced by her unique and stimulating office environment – I hated leaving her and the loft atmosphere after the job was over. Judi has since then created the New Tricks Academy and she started a group called Catapult ( “It is our duty to Catapult each other to Greatness”) that is held in her loft office once a week. Judi’s gathers her clients together in this stimulating work environment where we learn the new tricks of web marketing and business development. It’s important to have this kind of business follow through to teach the mechanics of web marketing. In one meeting alone, I learned how to get my web site to come up #two on the first page of my focused Google key word search. Thanks Judi.
Florist Website Design has been dominated by old school design of the on-line floral groups, FTD, TeleFlora and 1-800 Flowers. Now florist’s have a wonderful opportunity, with the new technologies available with social media and content management websites, to beat out their competitors in showcasing their finest work and specialties on-line. These technologies can be used to increase revenues from business activities they love to do, large parties and wedding for example and decrease their reliance upon the marketing provided by FTD, Telefora, 1-800 Flowers and other on-line ordering companies. With the new web tools and increased use of Internet, people can now easily Google a brick and mortar florist to order flowers from any city in the world. They can place their orders directly to a real person. This allows all of their budgeted money for an arrangement to go into their flowers and florist and delivery, cutting out the portion to the unnecessary broker. Check out this Business Week article, Is the Bloom off at FTD?.
In Atlanta, there are so many FTD, Teleflora and 1-800 Flowers sites and they all look essentially alike. The Florists Websites relying on these company templates have been lured in by easy and have become complacent maybe thinking a more personalized site would be too expensive or hard to maintain. Not now with WordPress Florist websites being able to be a regular business site with built in blogging ability all ready for Social Media Marketing Opportunities. Now you can post those professional photos your bride sent to you right on the site in a couple of minutes, showcasing the beautiful work that you did. The pictures of those roundy moundy’s from the Teleflora and such sites cannot compete with your being able to post beautiful examples of your favorite and more profitable work. Then you can send those posts out to Twitter and to FaceBook where more brides and event planners will be searching for options. Florists who use this new design and website technology have a huge advantage as their sites stand out from the crowd and are more personal representation of the shop and its unique qualities. People buy from people they Know, Like and Trust. These new Florist websites are able to build that in like a window into their shop.
New Tricks designed a WordPress website for Candler Park Flowers last March and by Mother’s Day they had sixty new orders from out of town than they had the year before all saying it was because of the website.
Want to know more? Here is Part One of the presentation by Dene Shepherd of New Tricks for the November 19th Floral Meet and Greet sponsored by Carlstedt’s Atlanta and Linda Knight McCarter. Beautiful flowers donated by Associated Farms were given out as door prizes throughout the night to the delight of all.
New Tricks was busy marketing this week on the premise that if we do our networking, and workshops in November then our December will be as busy as we want it to be. We had a great time at the Ga. Coaches Association round table meeting and the North Fulton Express Network Luncheon of the American Business Women’s Association. Good to see old friends and make some new contacts as well.
Here are our slides from both Dene’s and Judi’s presentations. The Coaches didn’t get to see Dene’s talk on Googling Yourself and other Online Marketing Tips. But both of the talks are on this Slideshare.
For those attending the workshop we are offering a free consultation on your on-line presence. We can do this by phone or in person so drop us a line or give us a call and we will get you on our schedule. We are limiting this offer to the first twenty people to respond.
Judi and I presented this ‘New Tricks for Social Media Presentation’ for the Brookhaven Rotary Club today. They were such a nice crowd. We hope they’ll invite us back soon.
Stromquist & Company has an existing website for product information and online ordering. They asked New Tricks to help create a complementary new site to share information with their colleagues in the commercial and industrial control community. [click to continue…]
Dene and I presented some Social Media Tips to a meeting of the Lady Rogue Business Network last night. Some of the tips were not exactly new tricks to everyone, but I guarantee that not everyone had done all of them. I think it was new information for most and I hope, for the others, it was a good reminder. I learned something new from Dene’s presentation. I didn’t know that I could customize my Google profile, so when I am finished posting the PDF file of the Five New Tricks of Social Media presentation, that is exactly what I am going to do.
Here’s the slide share version of the presentation:
For the past ten years, I ( Judi) had been working as a builder/developer converting warehouses into lofts, doing historic restorations of apartment buildings and rebuilding beach houses blown away by hurricanes. At one point back then, I Googled my construction company’s name. Lo and behold what came up was my dog, Craig’s blog on Dogster. Now you can just go read what happened on Craig’s site since he has posted on that subject, but I will go ahead and tell you that because of that incident, I found out how much search engines love the dynamic nature of blogs. At that point, I jumped in and changed my site to a WordPress blog and began to immerse myself in all things social media.
That turned out to be a really good thing that happened because right about that time construction industry was showing signs of slowing down. And by the time it did, I had found another very compelling occupation. Friends read my blog and then began asking me to help them with theirs. Then when friends of friends started seeking out my services, I joined up with Dene and away we went. Dene and I finished our logo and the New Tricks website and our business has been steadily growing ever since.
We have found that having an online presence with a blog format site is darn near essential if you have a product to see, a service to sell or are selling yourself, in the job market. One of our recent clients, Global Girl credits her blog with her recently being selected for a prestigious Washington DC internship. Having the blog gave her prospective employer a window into her work habits, her drive, her ability to write and think , her knowledge of social media, what she looked like, and so much more than she could or should not have put on her resume. Just a resume is not enough. People want to know who you are before taking a chance on you. By reading your blog they feel, rightly or wrongly that they know you. They can see what you are capable of .
People say that people prefer to buy from people that they know. I think that also holds true for employers bringing on new hires. It is good to have a referral before taking that step to bring someone on board. Whether you are selling something or selling yourself, you may want to consider getting yourself out there by blogging. Our motto is, ” It’s never too late to be the best in breed.”
I am Co-organizer of the Atlanta WordPress User's Group Meetup. We meet the third Wednesday of each month and try to have a little something for people at all levels.
Check it out! We now have almost 900 members!
