Internet Solutions Development Blog

Five ways you should use social media this holiday season

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:41:00 GMT

Wow, can you believe that fall is nearly hear. I'll be the first to admit that it has snuck up on me and I can't believe the summer is nearly over, which I am sure has all of you in holiday sales mod. And if not, then it should. The school sales rush is over and now it's time to set your sites on the holiday season and get your marketing in place before the holidays get here. And they'll be here before you know it.

With our ever expanding media channels to market from I see businesses are already contemplating what strategies will be the most effective for maximizing sales and I found some great statistics from Bizo that I wanted share with you. According to a survey from Bizo, 65 percent of executives claim that social media is the most important aspect for the upcoming shopping season, followed by e-mail at 46 percent and content marketing at 45 percent.

The survey also shows that 55 percent of executives measure social success based on their number of followers, and 19 percent of executives claim that they’ll improve content offers over the next quarter.

So I wanted to take a quick moment and give you a few options to take into consideration when preparing a social media campaign for the 2011 holiday season:

Sales - You should definitely be publicizing sales through social media that are specifically related to the holiday season. For example, you may want to post about early-bird specials, Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals or maybe even daily gift ideas.

THE AHA MOMENT: Did you know that suggesting gift ideas is a really great way to get consumers thinking about what items they still need to buy on their gift lists, and can lead to more sales.
Links - Posting links to your website through social media during the holiday season is crucial. The links will drive traffic to your site and help maximize sales, but make sure you are linking directly to pages that are appropriate. Don't link everything to your home page. If you are talking about "Widget A" then link to "Widget A" on your site.
Stay Interactive - Yes, the holiday season is a time to focus on sales, but don’t forget that social media gives you an amazing way to interact with your audience and create brand loyalty. You need to engage your audience and get them talking about your product and brand. How do you do that? Well, why not post holiday related questions or polls to keep your fans and followers interested. For example a toy store could ask, “What it the best thing that you ever received for Christmas?” or “What toy do your children want this holiday season?” This kind of consumer interaction will keep your fans thinking about you and/or your brand.
Contests - contests are a great way to get more fans, bring consumers into your store(s) and steer them to your website. For example, “Recommend our page to your friends and get entered to win a gift card,” or “The first 100 guests to make a purchase in our store tomorrow get 25% off when they use this coupon code (insert code).” These kinds of contests will get consumers attention because everyone likes free things, especially during the holiday season.
Give - If you've never heard the term "Give and you shall receive" you had better write it down because in todays technological world this has been proven time and time again. It is important to remember that the holidays are about giving. and I want you to consider social media as a way to promote what you will give back to the community during the holiday season. Raise money for families in need or set up a toy drive are a couple of ideas you might want to consider.

Bottom line, start putting your strategies in place right now because the holidays are right around the corner and I don't want you to miss out on your opportunity to have the best holiday sales you can possibly have because you didn't have a your holiday marketing plan in place.

Online Shopping Season Is Here: Are You READY!!!

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 02:31:00 GMT

Ok, so for those of you who thought that you had a little time to relax before the start of the shopping season I am here to tell you it's time to stand back up and start running. If you've forgotten how crazy the upcoming shopping season is then here is your wake-up call. Your customers are going to be spending money with someone. The question is, will it be you?

A lot of time and effort needs to go into planning your marketing for the upcoming shopping season and if you haven't started figuring out what that marketing strategy is, it's time to do so because you are going to be so overwhelmed by everything else during that time that you may forget about it all together. And that can be a very costly mistake.

Now I know with all of the different ways out there that you can market it can be a little overwhelming so I want to guide you through the most important thing you can do right now to get started.

The absolute most important thing you need to have in place is......YOUR EMAIL MARKETING. Now some of you might be surprised that I didn't say social media, but there is still massive debates about whether or not social media actually puts dollars in your pocket. Email marketing, on the other hand, has been proven year after year, and it works! Now, when I say email marketing I am not talking about a few emails that you are going to send out here and there. These need to directly reflect your promotions and special offers, your Black Friday and Ciber Monday deals. You need to stop thinking about email marketing in terms of sending out a broadcast email and start thinking about campaigning.

What do I mean by campaigning? I mean a systematic series of emails that go out to your list with one goal in mind. GET THEM TO COME BUY SOMETHING. Now, that doesn't mean that you send out a bunch of email campaigns that are all SELL SELL SELL. You first need to provide some great benefit to your consumer as well. You need to give them some incentive to come and buy from you. This can be handled in a lot of different ways. It could be a coupon, it could be a free gift with purchase or something like that. If you are running a promotion make sure you put a time limit on it and base your campaign off of that, and send several emails out to your list to make sure they don't miss it, and make each email more urgent than the last.

Bottom line, start thinking about those promotions and have them in place before you fall behind, get too busy, and forget about it.

Ann Wagner Chooses Genesis Platform Over IPage

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 01:59:00 GMT

Professional job search coach Ann Wagner of Ann Wagner Live was struggling with her website platform and was looking for a solution that would help her run her online business and expand with her growing clientele and allow her to sell her up and coming products to help people who are on that ever frustrating job hunt.

She reviewed several platforms including the wildly popular Wordpress platform, but after seeing what Genesis had to offer for her business in terms of client relation management, e-commerce, email marketing and analytics it was an easy choice for her.

I am very excited to get the opportunity to work with Ann Wagner and look forward to releasing her new webstie which is sure to be a crowd pleaser for those who are looking for job search help.

Stay tuned! We are nearly completed with it!

Royal Maintenance & Cleaning Chooses Internet Solutions Development

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:03:00 GMT

We are proud and excited to have Royal Maintenance and Cleaning Supplies on board as client! Art Davis, owner of Royal Maintenance and Cleaning Supplies was looking for a Denver Website Designer who could redesign his current site.

He was looking for more than just a redesign though. He was looking for a solution that would allow him to market to his clients, manage his client database, update his website, and the solution had to be search engine friendly so I showed him our Genesis Online Business Platform, which is what he decided to go with.

Not only because it did all of the things he wanted above, but because it was easily expandable to his needs by being able to be upgraded with a shopping cart in the future, without the hassle of having to move his entire website to a new platform.

We are looking forward to this project and working closely with Royal Maintenance and Cleaning Supplies now and in the future to help them accomplish their online goals.

Are your customers "Checking Out"?

Tue, 31 May 2011 13:36:00 GMT

Social Media has certainly changed the web and nothing is gaining momentum faster than the use of local search marketing tactics like the use of check ins with services like Four Square, Facebook Places, and Google Places. And now there are new services with a similar idea that are gaining popularity, and that is the idea of Check Outs.

This is a very interesting idea which I love because the entire idea is based on customer service. So your customer comes to your place of business and then checks out when they leave and gets the opportunity to post a review about their experience.

Now this could be a good or a bad thing. If your business is focused on offering great products and services and really take care of your customers, which you should, then this could really benefit you, and on the flip side of that if your business is lacking in that area it could really hurt you as well.

However, if utilized correctly it could drive a massive amount of traffic to your business by the ability to stay in touch with your customers by sending them updates for things like news, tips, special offer or events.

It also allows you to be found by more people because the more you are favored the more networks you reach, and thus the more often you are recommended in the searches, and best of all it's free for businesses to use.

I highly recommend going and signing up for an account to use this a tool to drive foot traffic to your door. No, I am not getting any money for endorsing this service or any kickbacks of any kind I just want to share with all of you this really great resource for staying connected with your customers and attracting new customers to your place of business.

To sign up for a free account just visit www.bizzy.com.

If you enjoyed the information in this post I would love to hear your feedback so please post your comments below.

Facebook places has arrived

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 12:41:00 GMT

Over the past couple of years we have seen social media explode and thus began the adoption of social media as a marketing tool for businesses, but this is unlike any marketing that any of us has ever seen before. The thought of having your customers spreading the word to their friends and colleagues without ever speaking to them is extremely powerful. That is what has been brought to the marketing table with services like Four Square, Google Check In, and now Facebook, which is really a game changer. Why? Well because even though people are starting to adopt Google Check In and Four Square it doesn't even come close to the audience that already lives and exists on Facebook, and with the release of Facebook Places you now have an even bigger opportunity to get your customers and audience to share with their friends and colleagues your product and/or service!

Now this idea of check ins has had a lot of business owners scratching their heads as to how they can utilize this social media marketing tool to get their customers to participate so let's look at an example. Let's say that you own a restaurant and that your business has been a little slow (or not, it doesn't matter) and you are running an amazing happy hour. You have a few people come in and they are having a good time, but you want to see more people come in. ENTER FACEBOOK PLACES! You should encourage your audience to check in to your establishment using their Facebook account which then get put into their Facebook feed and thus their friends feeds. Their friends see your amazing deal, their friends are already there, and thus they show up as well. Yeah, it is that easy.

So why would someone just post to Facebook where they are at for you? Well, for one people love to share good information, but you may offer them some kind of a reward like a free drink if they check in on Facebook and let their friends know. This is probably the least expensive and best marketing you can do.

So, lesson for today. Go check out Facebook places. Get familiar with it, and start utilizing it in your business today!

If you enjoyed the article please post your comments below, and if you would like more great resources and marketing ideas feel free to join our mailing list.

ISD To Offer Full Online Business Solution

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:21:00 GMT

Internet Solutions Development has recently taken steps forward to providing high quality, affordable web solutions for small to medium sized business, and now we are getting ready to take a giant leap forward with all all-in-one website business solution templates.

Now before you roll your eyes and say "Big deal, another place that offers website templates" you need to understand that these are not just website templates but complete online business platforms with content management, client relation management, email marketing, ecommerce, analytics, blogs, and more built right into it!

If you don't already know our online business platform Genesis has gotten some great reviews from the clients we have on it already, and the excitement is starting to swell around here about the next release of the software which has some great new features. But the question we get asked the most is, why don't you have a better selection of templates that are already integrated into Genesis that we can use out of the box. And we have been listening. You see we already offer some really nice basic templates that are integrated into the system, but in the coming weeks we are going to be offering our first premium template that is packed full of features and will be ready to go out of the box, and many more will come online after that.

Now I am sure that you have heard of premium templates before and when most companies say premium they just mean a premium design, but not ours. Not only will get a premium design but you will also get some of the latest javascript features such as news sliders, testimonial rotators, and much much more. And the best part about it is that the template will already be pre-integrated into our Genesis platform so you will get all the great features of that with some really nice customizations that are ready to go.

But we aren't stopping there. We are even building custom email templates for them and a complete set of video tutorials that show you how to manage every portion of your website. And all of that is on top of our already amazing knowledge base and support.

And because we don't believe in cookie cutter approaches to web design each design will be able to have any customization work done to it if it needs to in order to fit your particular needs. This will come at an additional cost, however.

We are extremely excited about the opportunities that this will present our clients and future clients and I hope you will let us know what you think as soon as we start releasing these amazing online business solutions.

How To Download YouTube Videos For Free

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:45:00 GMT

This is a very easy way to download Youtube videos locally to your computer. The resource is zamzar.com.

Let me know if you like this video by posting your comments below!

Restorative Justice Colorado Chooses ISD

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:22:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce that the Colorado Restorative Justice Council has chosen Denver website design company Internet Solutions Development to modify their existing website and integrate it into the Genesis platform.

After consultation they decided that it made a lot of sense to have all of their applications in one place which includes content management, client relation management, blog, and email marketing amongst others. They really saw the benefit of have these applications in one easy-to-use system that would also allow them to track all of their analytics within the system. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with such a great organization and will update our website as soon as the integration and design modification has been completed.

If you are interested in whether or not Genesis might be a good solution for your business you can view a brief video overview here, or please feel free to contact us directly by clicking here, or give us a call at 303.495.3033.

What's your new years Busolution?

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 01:19:00 GMT

Normally when we think of new years resolutions thoughts go through our heads like I am going to lose 25lbs, I am going to read more, I am going to volunteer more and so on, which is great. I do it too, but what a lot of us business owners forget to do, is ask ourselves what are we going to do for our businesses, and what are our businesses going to do be become better over the next year.

Now whether that be provide better service to customers, build new products, increase sales, have more time with your family or all of the above, it is important to think about what your business and what you want to accomplish in the next year. AND WRITE IT DOWN, STICK IT UP ON THE WALL WHERE YOU WILL SEE IT EVERY DAY, as a reminder to you which will help you stay focused.