In the past 10 years, only one homicide had previously been reported in the neighbourhood, they don’t know how Adam got into the school. Brave teachers moved children into bathrooms and closets as soon as the attack began. In particular Janet Vollmer, a kindergarten teacher, locked her classroom doors, covered the windows and read a story to her 19 students to keep them calm. Many of the children where taken to a nearby firehouse for safety, where panic stricken parents collected them.

Adam had no criminal record, some of his friends described him as a genius. Most bizarrely of all the weapons recovered appear to have been purchased by his mother. Police never had a chance to fire a shot. Adam’s mother was a teacher, but not at the school where the killings took place.

There is a huge response on social media. Many survivors tweeted from the scene. President Obama was in tears during a statement he made. Many of the childrens bodies have still not been moved because authorities have not been able to identify them. Flags have been ordered to fly at half-staff nationwide in tribute to the victims, and candlelight vigils are planned across the US as Americans try to comprehend the tragedy.

There was a vigil in Newtown where mourners spilled out of St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church because it was too full. Many surviving children are unsure which of their friends survived. The irony being that the principle had recently installed a new security system to ensure student safety. The new system required that every visitor ring a doorbell at the front entrance and report to the main office to sign in. It seems possible that Adam gained entrance just before the doors where locked at the start of the day, then commenced shooting once school had started.

This tragedy echos the 1999 Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado where two students shot 13 people to death before killing themselves. Regardless of the speculation or the media coverage, the most important thing is that we all take this tragedy as a moment to look around and enjoy our loved ones.

Tonight I will be holding a private vigil for the individuals who have been lost, for their families, and most of all for the lone gunmen that for reasons that we will never truly understand decided to commit a crime against his community that belies belief. The suffering of his family and friends who will the spend the rest of their lives trying to understand why will haunt us all.

Editor Note: We apologise for the sound on this video, it will be remastered shortly

Salesforce for sales systems.
Aweber for autoresponders
Getty Images for Images
etc.

What I am going to tell you now has been my dream for the last 3 years…

I dream of a world in which there is a low cost one stop shop for just your website… $19/month on a 12 month contract. Get an upgrade every 12 months, just like your mobile phone.

Say you have a dream? What do you do?
Talk
write it out
Eventually you need a website…

What do you do then?

Well if you are lucky then you know how to make a website, but if you are unlucky and only starting out without any money then your idea might die right there because you don’t have anything to look professional. You can’t tell that investor or that banker to just look at your website for more information. Because your website doesn’t exist or worse its crap. Some free or nearly free template, usually with a really long name like
www.myfreewebsite.someadvert.com. Maybe you get a facebook page instead, but you still have the name problem, and everyone can see you don’t have a website which once again makes you look unprofessional.

So maybe you where like me and you spend 3 years learning all the in’s and outs of how to make a website look good, what doesn’t work, what does work. Well quite frankly by the end of that you are exhausted and can’t even remember what the original idea was. And that… is a tragedy. That great idea which could have helped the world, just died a death, because you didn’t have an easy and professional way to present it to the world.

But what if… you could go to the one place you know could help. The one place that will give you a professional custom website. But its not just another system which has limitations. This is a wonderful place that uses all the best practices. It uses wordpress (the number one CMS, which is updated nearly every week) as its website system. It gives you a free domain name, free hosting. It takes away all the technical headaches. Best of all it has someone on the end of the phone to lead you through your design process.

It looks good, it has an easy name, it can be tracked with analytics. Its integrate-able meaning you can hook it up to your facebook or youtube or twitter, you can customise it yourself as you learn more advanced techniques… namely it does the job you need. It BRINGS YOUR IDEA TO LIFE. Oh and by the way it backs everything up, no headaches, never fear. And it upgrades itself so you don’t have to worry about all those niggly problems.

Don’t let your idea die, because you don’t know what to do next to make it happen. Get it moving with a website which handles all the headaches and plans for the future. You could spend the next 3 years of your life struggling with all the options only to realise that the pro’s use wordpress, and trust me this system is their dream.

There was one on that list above that didn’t appear. Thats websites. No one has quite got the formula right yet. Some people give you free and crap, others people give you free and limited or outdated. Other people give you really expensive and still crap (in a business sense). I want to give you cheap, reliable, progressive, interchangeable and most of all EASY.

This is my dream, and that is what I will give my very life to achieve. I want to save people’s ideas by giving them a chance to breath inspiration to others.

Its is still a long way off, it needs systems, and when it is finally ready it will need to be put out there, it will need to hit the perfect mark. One day I will reach the top of this mountain.

Lindsay

So far I have discovered that cute pictures of Animals get the best response, particularly in compromising position just like the one on this post.

So if you have a small business and you want to gain a bit of extra exposure it can’t hurt to add a colourful (and hopefully cute) picture to your news/blog posts then make sure to repin them onto pinterest.

I hadn’t really been using pinterest until my Social Media Consultant got me more interested in it last month, but with a female biased demographic it is proving to be extremely popular new social media tool. The best thing is that at the bottom of every post which is repinned a link will be included back to the source, which in this instance would be your website.

It seems the common opinion on Pinterest is something along the lines of “its great because its social without being personal”. I.E. you don’t have to like every single picture of babies that your in laws put up at pain of causing a family rift. Most of all its FUN, which is my favorite emotion.

So peace out and repin the cool picture above!

Easter is time for fun, children and easter bunnies. But it is also a big season for internet marketing in small Businesses.

Particularly food industries in Ireland who have suffered through lent will gear up ready for the new market demand.

I recommend that this season you give pinterest a try for your small business marketing. By including a blog post or some pretty pictures in your online material. Then get your web developer to insert a Pinterest button onto your material and you have got a ready made viral campaign.

On top of this make sure to reinvigorate your customers by sending them an update via an email, and creating a special offer just to make them feel special. Its important to keep these things simple as one can often run away with an idea until its far too complex. I know I can!

Finally think about applying a custom design to your website (this is for the slightly larger business with the budget). This will pull many more visitors as it becomes an online talking point.

So without further ado – how adorable is this little baby bunny!!!

• Get every single update on your website or social media site into google without fail
• Improve your rankings in Google
• Get twice as many readers for every update you put on your website or social media site.
• Get better fuel efficiency for your marketing efforts.
• Create instant visibility and noise.

Maybe you need RSS!

“What is RSS I hear you cry?”

Better known as ‘Really Simple Syndication’, you can think of RSS as a type of  information pipe. It takes any information you put into the web and spreads it around. For example you update Facebook and RSS information pipe will update your website. Or you update your website and the RSS information pipe will update Google for you. So you post one update and you get 10 times the impact: because your one update will be repeated over and over again across hundreds, or even thousands of other locations on the internet. This saves you time and effort, while improving the effect of your marketing messages to reach your target audience.

1 update, 10 times the impact!

This is also a long term strategy. Set this up once, and it will keep working forever. Free advertising, spreading your message around the internet, and it only gets bigger over time. The more people connect with your RSS feed, and the more places you submit your RSS feed the more noise each of your company updates will make on the web.

A long term strategy. Set this up once, and it will keep working forever!

Below is a diagram which describes it a bit better:

Setting up RSS is easy:

Here are 5 secret steps to use RSS:

1. Add an RSS feed to your update page (e.g. your blog, your homepage, your facebook page). And remember to add an RSS subscribe button on your website.
2. Run that RSS feed through feedburner to track your statistics on how much effect the rss amplifier is having for each of your updates.
3. Link the RSS feed to each of your publishing channels (Your blog, your twitter account)
4. Submit your RSS feed to search engines and aggregators so that every update goes out across the blogosphere.
5. Use an automated software to keep submitting your RSS feed to any internet service it can find

Or we can do all of this for you for the one time low price of  €59 per RSS feed..

Contact us now and get a free 15 minute consultation on marketing your business…

What do you want to achieve? In a very real way your website is a unique expression of who and what you do, not just an accessory but a full on show of who you are and what you do. Include a mission statement on your home page. Think about your colours, think about your imagery. Write out lists of things which appeal to you, people that inspire you; this may sound silly but it can have a profound effect on your website visioning. Create a vision board to keep all these ideas together.

Who do you want to target? You need to narrow down your target market for your website, even if it is not a business website you still need to figure out exactly who is going to be looking at the website. This is important because otherwise people will not be interested in what they see on your website. Start by thinking exactly who you are not targeting. Try to cut half the people out of the world in a single statement, then cut the new group of people in half again. Keep going until you can’t thing of anything else. This group of people is your market. For example, we are looking at fishing (about half the world), in ireland (about half of ireland), sea fishing (about half of fishermen), interested in catching Bass. Now you have a niche group who you can start to visualise in your own mind.

What are your principles and values? Figure out what you want to get across on your website. This final point is important because you want to make sure you imprint yourself onto your website. Everything should be perfectly finished to encompass your message. What ever you want to communicate or sell to your visitors it should come across effortlessly. Giving a visitor a distinct impression of your brand, and carrying them through each stage of your marketing process. The homepage should lead to an offer page should lead to a contact page should lead to a sharing page should lead to a response page. Even better if you can provide near instant responses to issues.

Fast Loading web site designs

You may design a web site that looks fantastic but few people are going to visit it if it takes a long time to load. Your designs should be optimized for the web and should not take more than 15 seconds to load otherwise it will be highly neglected by web users.

Clear Navigation

Your website must have clear navigation once user has been entered in it. To do this you need to have clear navigation and make sure your links are at the important places. Preferably right at the top where the visitors usually watch them and try to link as many of pages to your site.

Browser Compatibility

Make sure your website looks good and work properly in all internet presently working like netscape, Mozilla firefox, Safari along with opera and Google Chrome.

Readabale and professional looking fonts

Using pink and bright colors or more darker contrasts will make website unable to read easily by the visitors. mic Sans and other fancy fonts that may not be available on most computers.

Check broken links and avoid images

Minimine the use of Images because simple designs are more attractive looking.  Minimize use of too much graphics and white space on your webpage. Check for Broken Links, you can check these using Dreamviewer and right click on any file to check whether its broken or not .

1. Plan – before you get going make sure that you have talked to all the important people in your business. If you are a small operation its good to consult the wife/husband because they usually have some great ideas. Pencil your ideas onto a bit of paper. Think about what the website is going to do for your, why do you want a website: usually its because there is another business in your industry who already got one, and now you are jealous (at least of how successful it is working out for them).

2. Experience – the next step is to ask around for a good web designer. Personal referrals will always give you better options than a wide scale search of newspapers and the internet. When you make contact with the designer don’t look for a huge corporation but rather look to see what their portfolio looks like and check previous clients for references. There is a caveat, web designers who have got stuck in web 1.0 (read 1990′s) technology can be unaware of the latest developments such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Services. It is important to check that some of the previous websites in their portfolio have facebook, or twitter available on the sidebar content.

3. Customer Service – Make sure you speak with the designer on the phone, they should make you feel comfortable and be ready to lead you through the process of webdesign. Although it is not usually necessary to meet with your webdesigner, it is important to stay in constant contact throughout the design process. Also make sure that the Web designer is prepared to fix all problems which may occur after the completion of the project. A good rule is fix it if its broken pay for it if its new development; no different to any warranty on any other product.

4. Cost – cost is a difficult one, often a ‘how long is a piece of string’ question. You could pay €10,000 for the complete website experience, but if you are a small concern its more reasonable to pay under €1000 for a contract. Set a maximum budget for your marketing make sure to factor in your funding, grant, and investment proposals. Then specify the minimum requirements for your website: facebook integration, a newsletter system, content management system etc.  Then get some quotes that meet the minimum requirements. Sometimes this can be a bit catch 22 because you don’t know what you want until you see it. But a website design service which has a clear pricing structure will help you to figure out your costs more easily, so look for companies which provide up front prices.

5. Act – this seems simple, but the quicker you get something, anything at all up onto the internet, the better it is for your business. Many people wait far too long for the perfect moment to launch their website. You can always have an official launch later. You can always revise the website, hell you should revise your website. The beauty of the internet is that there is not any physical cost in changing your website (and thats why you should make sure that you have a content management system).

A few notes for when you are assessing a website designer. Now days most of the web is built on standardised platforms which have proven themselves to be the best at what they do. It is dangerous to trust a web designer who claims to have built a system completely from scratch when there already perfectly good systems which have been completely tested. Here is a list of the best platforms for each aspect of your internet marketing:

• Content Management of websites – wordpress/joomla
• Hosting – Dedicated or bluehost/hostgator
• Newsletter Systems – Aweber