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Website Magazine just recently published an article which hits the nail right on the head.

“Without question, the most critical area when it comes down to pricing a website design project is the actual needs of your site. What does your company’s website require? Will you have a custom Content Management System (CMS), a shopping cart platform, blog, Flash, forum or any number of other features? How many pages will you need?

You must be aware of these needs before even looking at designers, so first and foremost you need to sit down and decide what your site is going to look like and what it will be able to do.

Of course, there are a few things that you don’t have much of a choice in and must be built into your site. The foundational elements of a website that will cost you some money include hosting, database design, business logic programming, markup, styling and graphics, standards-compliance, accessibility and testing, and continual maintenance.

You have to remember that when you’re pricing these different features, you’re paying for both the implementation and labor/time necessary to include them on your site. If you’re paying a flat fee or package rate, then they are both already included in the price, but if you’re paying hourly it can become costly if you’re asking for a lot of bells and whistles.

What it all comes down to is making sure you have the most efficient website for your company. Selecting an effective design and choosing the right designer for the job is a big undertaking, and often getting the best is not cheap. But in the end, the results should be worth the investment.”

Click here to read the article in full

Watch it on youtube and set the settings to 480p for best resolution. Also make sure you take some time to pause on each slide to read the entire text as the voiceover does not read the slides verbatim. ENJOY!

Digital World Expo – Video Campaign Development presentation

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Who Should Use Google Analytics Premium and does this mean that Google is not going to invest in the free version moving forward?

Read this fantastic and very informative article on the subject to find out the answers to these questions and more! — Google Analytics Premium: Better Support & Goodbye Data Sampling

Facebook is one of the easiest pages to rank at the top when people search for your business, yet few businesses are currently optimizing their Facebook pages for search.

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PRINT and eBOOK editions out now!

The ultimate advertising survival guide!

The book features tips, case studies and easy to digest how-to segments for all business owners and marketing managers.

What’s In It For You?

Without this book, you will be hurled into the world of trial and error, which can be costly.

Consider the small price of this guide as a way to invest in your marketing, advertising and social media education. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and frustration in the process.

This guide will teach you the in’s and outs of gaining expert status in your niche or brand.

You’ll learn how to create a powerful campaign that people will not only be receptive to, but will remember and respect. You will have people beating down your door to buy your products and services.

CLICK THE BUTTON BELOW TO READ TESTIMONIALS FOR THE BOOK AND TO ORDER YOURSELF A COPY NOW!

ISBN 978-1-257-90685-7

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Editor’s Note: Flora Nicholas is the Chief Executive Officer of Brainwave, Inc., and the author of many great posts on the Mad Woman Blog. The following post is from her blog and is reposted with permission.

Last week, the unemployment rate in America, went up by at least one, as Anthony Weiner finally did the decent thing — in my humble opinion any way — and resigned as a member of the US House of Representatives. Yes folks, Anthony Weiner is leaving the house to get his own house in order. Awesome!!

As Anthony will be considering his career options sometime soon, I would like to give him a few, helpful suggestions in my capacity of business and image adviser extraordinaire. So dear Anthony, put that blackberry down and listen up because here I go.

First of all, you should hang out your shingle – but absolutely nothing else whatsoever — and try to become a social media marketing consultant. As you probably know, this is a rapidly growing field and you do seem to have a natural talent for it.

You have already proven to the entire country that you know how to use Twitter and Facebook to devastating effect. And you could feasibly claim that with just one tweet you ensnared coverage of your credentials and positions on all the broadcast networks, every cable station known to man, and thousands of web sites all over the Internet.

So trust me, it wouldn’t take much to convince your former democratic colleagues that you would be an invaluable asset — as opposed to an ass-et —in the 2012 election campaign.
Given everything that you’ve recently learned about PR crises and how to manage them (after you mismanaged them), I also believe that you could pursue a very lucrative career in crisis communications consulting — of the political kind, of course. Your list of potential clients would be enormous and you could demonstrate your ability to work across party lines by counseling errant republicans and democrats alike.
Indeed, I am sure that Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards, Chris Lee, and John Ensign would readily sign up as clients. You could charge them a fortune and advise them of the three most crucial things to do when the maid, videographer, picture, staffer or tweet hits the fan. (And as you know, those “things”, in no particular order are: 1. Fess up immediately, 2. Fess up immediately and 3. Fess up immediately.)
As you now have unbelievable name recognition, you could, if you prefer, seek a lucrative career as a spokesman for some of the most famous companies in the country. And although I don’t want to be one of those people who make fun of your name, really I don’t, you would be a natural spokesman for Oscar Mayer’s Wieners, Cockburn’s Port, Cox Communications, and yep, even Dick’s Sporting Goods. (Sorry, Anthony, I couldn’t resist, but you get the drift. There’s money to be made from the right brand endorsements, baby!)

Now, given your pre-scandal ease in front of the cameras, you should also absolutely consider a career in television. Consider this: CNN hired Elliot Spitzer even after he admitted using the services of call girls while he was attorney general and later governor of New York. So I’m sure that CNN, at the very least, and possibly NBC, ABC, and CBS would be very interested in you.
In fact, to be honest, I can easily see you being the host of a number of great current affairs shows — including Anthony Weiner 180, Hard Face the Nation, Dateline with Anthony Weiner, or even This Week With a Guy Who Needs a Job When Christiane Amanpour Has a Day Off.

And before I forget, please, please, please don’t rule out an acting career either. In the last three weeks, you have after all demonstrated the ability to deliver the most fictional lines — “I did not send that tweet”, “My system was hacked”, and “I was pranked” — without batting an eyelid. So if a casting call goes out for HBO’s “ In Treatment” series” throw your hat (or should that be your underpants) into the ring and keep your fingers crossed that they need an actor to play the role of a sexty — I said “sexty” not “sexy” — politician.

But when all is said and done, the best career advice I can give you dear Anthony, is to
keep a low profile for the next few years and run for Republican David Vitter’s Senate seat in Louisiana in 2016. As you know, in 2007 Senator David Vitter confessed, with his poor wife standing alongside him, that he had used the services of a prostitution ring on several occasions back in the late 1990s. Not only did Vitter survive the scandal, but he was actually re-elected— yep re-elected!!— to the Senate in 2010 by his constituents.

So Anthony, as you consider your future career options, please take note: No matter how much of an ass you are, there is always room in politics for a weiner.

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Whether you are an advertising professional or a business owner you must immerse yourself in your product to give it the advertising it deserves. Learn what it is that makes your products emotionally appealing to your various target markets and find yourself making the profits you never knew were possible.

If you are looking at your products and taking them for face value then it’s time for you to leave creative advertising to the pros and get back to your extremely important administrative work.

You can’t sell people on just straight-forward logical explanations of product benefits. The late sales guru Zig Ziglar said it best, “People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.”

Keep that in mind as you go over your product and try to find a pitch.

Science and advertising: Don’t take it from Me. Take it from the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex

What motivates clients to get up from in front of the TV, magazine etc. and to go buy your products?

Sure, you can tell your target market that your broom cleans things quickly. But if you demonstrate that the side effect of this quickness will be the extra time they’ll get to spend with their family… simply because they bought your broom, then you’ve stepped into their emotional zone.

As presented in this article by Jonah Lehrer, emotional ties in our advertising actually has an affect on the way people perceive your products. So much so, in fact, that it makes things taste better. Lehrer sites a study by Read Montague comparing Coke and Pepsi, where people actually liked Pepsi better when it was labeled as Coke.

Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t present logical information or that you must come up with completely hair-brained advertising schemes. Not at all.

Just make sure you give the people true emotional reasons to buy from you and that will be the edge you need to win the fierce competition in the marketplace!

Happy marketing!