Duct Tape…it is like “The Force”

    I read once that duct tape is like “The Force” it has a dark side, a light side, and hold the world together.  I don’t know if I mentioned that my favorite use for it is wrapping my head with it so when my head explodes for whatever reason that may be, the EMTs will be able to transport all of my skull with my body for re-attachment.

    Today was a typical Monday in the sense that all the world seemed out to get me.  I even went to work early today hoping that no one would notice my early entrance.  The coffee pot contained a thin film that would pass for not empty, the water cooler was beyond not empty, the creamer was almost a dust in the carton.  IT guy – caffeine = catastrophic failure!  So once I have paid the ferry man and crossed the river Styx, filled my cup with coffee ,I attempt to make way to the desk in the “Puzzle Palace”.

    I make it all the way to the desk and unpack my notebook PC.  I then spend the next nine hours swimming in jello and adding layer upon layer of duct tape to my head.  Bright spot, I did manage to get our ERP software Epicor to run a a 64bit version of XP Pro!  I got web statistics reported and did some time looking over the increase in traffic and getting a visitor to the coveted contact us page.  We have made a few conversions and I continue to map out the next phase of changes.  Mike the owner and I have a few things we have been discussing and drawing up. I keep reading and learning from Jeffery and Bryan Eisenberg’s book Call to Action.

    This is a fairly short post as I need to go soak the tape off my head and go to sleep.  Perhaps tomorrow will be a better day…it at least will be tomorrow and not Monday.

Hey Mambo!!!

    I have spent most of the last few afternoons building a new site in Mambo.  That is a new CMS(content manages solution) for me as I am accustomed to working with DotNetNuke.  Never the less this has been fairly easy to grasp and use.  Some clunky thing to get used to and some navigation to learn, but over all it has been fun.

   I really am excited about the new site and our existing company site over at tuscodisplay.com.  I have started to track changes and updates to that site.  Since the 20th of February we ave started to see some climbs upward in the search engines.  I have also started lookingat not only the “hits” but also the depth of sessions.  I have added links into the pages as using the sessions of client visits to script their steps to conversions.  Jeffery and Bryan Eisenberg suggest that you create a wire map and storyboards to conceptualize the path through your site.  I also had a few folks outside the company “shop” the site, boy that was a surprise!  I am quickly uncovering a number of flaws in some of my own thinking that I have need to correct about designing and building websites.

    Another bit of news on the LinkedIn/Social Networking scene-My boss told me at lunch today that a former client contacted him via LinkedIn and they have set up a meeting at an upcoming trade show to discuss possible business deals in the near future.  Now I am going to count this as a conversion although it didn’t come in via the website, but I have kind of taken the lead on our digital marketing.  I consider this a great bit of news that our efforts to maximize our presence on the web via these tools has been positive.  Some of the same principles of building websites also apply to writing copy for your LinkedIn profile.  Think small act big, 5 to 10 good keywords to sum up your experience, if you are looking to get some push for you company customer concentric job experiance.  There are folks using the searches on LinkedIn to find clients, employees, and even a job.  I can only image that the search engine on LinkedIn is tuned in a similar fashion as Google for quick results.

  Well enough for today, tommorow  will certainly hold plenty of new and exciting things to learn and do.

Mending Fences and Broken Website

Well I am grateful for someone making me learn HTML.  That is a story worth repeating:  When I first started at Tusco Display I was a support person.  You know, that person you call when your PC stop behaving in the way you expect or desire.  I had spent several weeks getting familiar with the infrastructure of the network, learning my job duties, and pretty much trying to figure out how I fit into a company that manufactured Point of Purchase displays.

My boss one day brought me a book on HTML and told me to look at it and learn it.  I felt like Daniel in the Karate Kid when I asked ,”Why?” and he said, “You will see”.  Likewise he did the same thing in return with a book on SQL server, Unix, and Visual Basic.  I learned a bit and it has become useful in the last six years.  But I digress.

Continuing on my quest for better marketing my employers website, I set to effectively breaking the finely crafted CMS they host it in.  I like DotNetNuke and have been using Mambo recently.  I am comfortable with theses tools.  I am not really sure what control set our site is host in, but it was pretty easy to mess it up.  Needless to say by the time Craig Ferguson finished his monologue I got it back to 99.9% fixed.

Beings I am a guy who helps build websites I am not really happy with ours and of course nothing would make me happier than to convert it to DNN, but that will be a ways off I suppose.

So with the fences mended for now, it is back to writing customer focused material and adding links that tie calls to action together.  It is a little backwards doing it this way, but I feel I can with the tools fr0m Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg it is very achievable

Today to better understand who we do business with I sent out an email to all of the folks here at Tusco Display and asked three questions.

1. Who is our most important customer?
2. Why would you say they are most important?
3. Describe them in 50 words or less.

I guarantee you will be suprised at the answers.

I also sent the following questions to the Owner and President of Tusco Display:

Are we engaged in accidental marketing?

Could you gentlemen offer me brutally honest answers to the following list?

1. What came first-the idea for our product or service or the understanding that there was a market need that needed filling?

2. Who are our customers?

3. What do they really need?

4. What benefits (not features) of our product or service satisfy the real needs of our customers?

5. What about our products or services is unique, and how can we answer the question, “Why should I buy from these guys?”

6. What other options does a customer have instead of buying from us (including nothing at all)? Are those options better or worse?

7. How does a customer make a decision to buy our products or services?

8. What does a customer have to know before they will buy from us?

9. How does a customer perceive not only our product, but our company compared to our competitor?

10. What is the process a customer goes through before buying our products and services?

11. What is the value of our product or service to the client?(This is not the price.)

12. What would a customer say to a colleague if asked for a recommendation of our products and services?

Once again my thanks to Bryan Eisenberg for his permission to cite from the book “Call to Action”, as he and his brother will help anyone drive visitors to converts.

Stay tuned as we keep climbing up the hill to successful web marketing.

Breaking Ranks

    Well if you have been following my folly as of late I am in the process of “tuning up” the Tusco Display website.  I went on over to Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg’s website and got some great tools to further my dissection of our current site.  Was rather fond of the WeWe Monitor , and shocked about what it tells me about us.  I have become a student of “Who do we say we are?”  I have begun asking the question, “Why would people do business with Tusco Display?”  “Who is Tusco Display and what do they offer a potential client?”  These are important questions as I have begun to look at our website from a new point of view.  With my new vision I see our site as a big discount warehouse with aisles and aisles of stuff to look at and see, but there is no “checkout” or an easy way to ask and get answers. 

    So I went to work making some small changes.  Knowing that our content isn’t customer concentric I had to start writing some new copy or at least rearrange some of our current copy.  I also knew we had no links in our site to help guide a vistor to any kind of direction or get any answers.  So here I was like Tim Allen making home improvements and then it happened!  I broke our website!

    I know it isn’t broken, but needs it’s tight well organized but by another author code restored to it’s original condition…or does it?  I have in some stroke of luck put our contact form on EVERY page.  Now I have to get a little deeper into Call to Action and find out if that is too much to ask a contact form on page.

    In the meantime I will read a little more and see if I can get the code straightened out.

The Faster I Run The Behinder I Get

    I had really hoped to get all of the events of the last week in some form of order so there was some fluidity to my story.  Alas as it always is for a one person IT operation I am running out of caffeinated hours in my day to fulfill all of my digital duties.

    So here is last week in a nutshell.  I have had a HUGE amount of success apply the three platforms of social networking.  LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter have become staples in my application arsenal.  I also have started this blog which is going to be followed by colleagues, family, friends, and I suspect a few enemies as well.  I have made new friends like Angela at ShinyDoor, got connected with an old friend on Facebook, reacquainted myself with a former client turned mentor on LinkedIn, and got a good business direction and help from what I consider a giant in the industry of web business via Twitter.

    So now I find myself working on extranet for our external clients including out national account managers at Tusco Display, intranet is an ongoing improvement cycle, and building up our web presence @ www.tuscodisplay.com.  This doesn’t include the day to day duties I perform here at work and at our home based business Technology Workgroup.  Needless to say I forgot to mention integration of a new time and attendance system to our ERP software.

    The biggest purpose of this blogging experience was to illustrate and document my evolution of our company web site www.tuscodisplay.com.  I was fortunate enough to get in touch with Bryan Eisenberg via Twitter.  For those of you who are not familiar with Bryan and his brother Jeffery  they have author several book and white papers about successfully selling and converting visitors into clients.  I have heard words like “the bible” or “gold standard” of web marketing to describe their teaching and methodology.

   So now I feel up to speed and further behind as I write this post, as my wife’s words come to mind as I left this morning, “Don’t forget our 8:00 PM with the Trustees of Dover First Moravian Church“.  This is another project Technology Workgroup is taking on as we are members of that church and this is our gift of service we are offering.  So here is my blogging challenge, I will be writing about what I learn in “Call to Action” by Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg, and inviting all of my readers to follow the changes on both of these site as in some way we will be working to make visitors into converts.