Simplify Your Paintings

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Contact: Jean K Stephens

Instructor: Jeffrey Swaluk In this two-day painting workshop, Saturday and Sunday, April 25 and 26 students will learn how less can be more, an aid to help you paint more quickly and efficiently and create concise, powerful paintings. Participants may work in oil or acrylic. www.swaluk.com

When: Jun 3, 2009 10:00:00 AM to Jun 3, 2009 4:30:00 PM
Where: Rochester Art Supply in Rochester,New York
Cost: $165
Posted by:rollup

Monotype Printmaking Workshop

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Contact: Jean K Stephens

Instructor: Phyllis Bryce Ely In this printmaking workshop, Friday, May 15 students will explore the art of monotype, a freeing combination of painting and printmaking that produces one of a kind images. Open to artists of all levels, no prior printmaking experience needed. www.curlingart.com

When: Jun 3, 2009 10:00:00 AM to Jun 3, 2009 4:00:00 PM
Where: Rochester Art Supply in Rochester,New York
Cost: $85
Posted by:evdb

How Do I Create a Search Engine Friendly Site?

Good Question!

If you’re going to spend the money to have a website designed for your company’s online brochure or any other purpose, having one that will be seen should be your number one goal. Otherwise you’re just throwing money away.
5 things to avoid:

Flash intros
I love the look of a good flash intro and we still design them for our clients when they ask for them. However, I always advise not to have one if you are looking to optimize your site for search engines. A search engine friendly site has readable text that the search engine crawlers/spiders/robots can read. They cannot read the content in flash. Consider having a flash header or another flash element on your homepage in addition to readable text instead. It will give you better SEO results.

Lacking content
I always say “Content is King” and I mean it. Having plenty of keyword rich content on your site will help you get noticed by the search engines and visitors alike. I always bookmark sites that have a wealth of information useful to my business or me. If you are looking for a minimal design for aesthetic reasons, you may want to rethink it. Quality content will create visitor loyalty.

Outdated content
If you’re going to place a calendar of events on your site, you should be prepared to update it. If you leave old information on there from last year and don’t have anything current, visitors may just close the browser and look elsewhere. In addition, search engines pay attention to continually updated sites. If your website is static and never changing, you’ll be ignored. Try to continually add fresh content for optimal results.

Too many images or animated gifs I know they look cool and are fun to play with, but honestly, when you go to a site that is flashing and moving everywhere – don’t you feel lost? A little bit of movement works well to draw attention to the areas where you want people to pay attention, but continual movement throughout the entire page can be tiresome to the visitor. Furthermore, the crawlers can’t read the images. Having your sales message in a slick image rather than just plain text might be your desire, but if you’re looking for performance in your website – you’ll want to use actual text.

Generic linking
You should always avoid using “click here” to get your visitor to the next page. The crawlers also see it and give you more weight in the results if you are using proper anchor text in the link. For example, if I want to draw attention to our design page, I might use something like this: Please review the Complete Business Systems website design portfolio to view some samples of our design work.

In addition to the items to avoid, always remember to use your meta tags for title, description and keywords as well as the other SEO tips that I regularly write about. If you need a refresher, have a look through the archives located over on the right hand side of our blog.
… Continue

How Can I Get Listed on Google Maps?

Good Question - Easy Answer!

You should take advantage of any free marketing tool for your business. Google Maps is one of those outlets that are available to you at no charge.

You'll increase your business visibility and provide your customers with a snapshot of your business in an easy-to-use application.

Simply go to:

Google Local Business Center

Add your business listing and fill out the online form:

1. Required Information
2. Category
3. Hours and Payment
4. Photos and Video
5. Custom

You can also create a coupon with your listing that can draw more customers to your business.

Encourage your current customers who are happy with your services to rate and write a review of your business.

You’ll need to verify that you are the owner of your business by phone verification or having a postcard mailed to you.

In addition you can also list your business on Yahoo! by going to Yahoo! Local Listings and creating an account with them.

I encourage you to add your business listing today and start getting the word out - it's easy and it's free!

Joanne … Continue

Small Business Bailout?

Yesterday I posted on Twitter that I’m tired of the big guys getting bailed out.

How about if they just gave each American 1,000,000 instead?

It would stimulate the economy like nobody’s business!

I was surprised nobody fired back at me with basic economics arguments or anything at all really.

I guess my post was lost in a sea of tweets…

It got me to thinking about how many of my clients are small business owners and they, like every other American are having some difficulties these days.

In fact, I haven’t been blogging because I’ve been out there selling much more than I usually do.

My conversations with potential clients in the past few months have mainly focused on how they can get new business during the economic crisis.

Some consider their advertising to be the number one vehicle and are finding their company resources too low to continue on.

Others see the effects of their website being open 24/7 and want to improve upon conversion by updating their sites.

It is true, your website is one of your most valuable resources.

People are doing research online and at home before venturing out to purchase.

With a website, your presence is open and available even when your business is closed for the day.

Really?

Yes, really.

In fact, let me go have a peek at our analytics so I can give you our numbers – BRB!

OK, I’ve got the data in front of me...

According to our analytics, over the past year 41% of our website visits are occurring after our regular business hours. We are open 8:00 – 6:00 pm PST and quite a large amount of traffic is coming when we aren’t open for business.

What does this information tell us?

People are shopping on their time – not ours.

We receive many contact inquiries from our website contact forms when we aren’t open for business. These are qualified sales leads that are waiting for us in the morning when we begin our workday. Many of these contact inquiries throughout the year have converted into sales.

Who wouldn’t want that?

Maybe if the government was cutting you a check for YOUR bailout you wouldn’t want it…but I doubt it.

What do you think? … Continue