I couldn't be happier about representing Digett at this year's Texas Travel Summit (September 21-24), hosted by the Texas Travel Industry Association. For starters, I haven't been to Galveston since I was a kid, and I'm itching to erase the memory of a brutal sunburn. Better yet, I'll be bringing many of you with me.
Like many folks, I've been spending some of my spare time over the last week watching the Olympics. Every four years, I say I'm not going to get caught up in it all; shortly after the opening ceremony, however, I find myself awake at 3 a.m., intently following the women's handball finals.
Recent happenings here have spurred me to consider the above question anew. Indeed, our firm was recently informed that a site we designed won an award from the Greater San Antonio Builders Association: the 2008 Summit Award for Best Website for a Builder.
Strictly speaking, this type of award is a low-risk proposition for Digett. We didn't have to make a formal submission—which means we didn't have to prepare entries, pay a hefty submission fee, and spend time and money attending a banquet just to see if we won. The award wasn't even given by our industry.
Many awards competitions, however, require that type of investment and offer no promise of return; you just can't guarantee a win will directly drive new clients to your door. Still, before you spend your money and time elsewhere, consider what these competitions may offer:
I spoke to a local service organization this morning about, among other things, some fundamentals of SEO. Architecture, content and link-building were the three highlights of this discussion. What I think I may have failed to communicate was the difference between driving traffic through search engine optimization and attracting an audience by offering compelling content.
Last week, I received a direct mail piece from a local car dealership informing me the Honda Element I currently drive is in high demand. Shockingly, they wanted to buy my trusty wagon and put me behind the wheel of a shiny, new car—at an unbelievable price, of course.
When it comes to subject lines for email campaigns or newsletters, word choice can make or break a subscriber's decision to open a message or not. There's no magic bullet for compelling a subscriber to open and read your newsletter, but ponder these ideas about subject lines before your next mail blast.
We frequently field questions from clients related to email campaigns. What makes a good subject line? How do you get readers to click-through? There's a lot of factors that go into a successful email campaign so we're breaking our tips up into a series of posts to share some of our expertise.
Many Digett clients have heard me talk about improving a web page's position on a search engine results page, the practice commonly referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It doesn't take a genius to understand that the higher a page appears during a Google search, the more likely it is that a user will visit the page.
Whether you are aware of this or not, many of us see meta descriptions at least a few times every day. We might see hundreds of them, in fact. Every time you Google a phrase (which I do at least ten to twenty times daily), the SERP displays a list of page titles, each followed by a a short description derived from its respective web page's meta description.
Yesterday's weekly team lunch was significant for a few reasons:
