MPS is lucky to be working with Vintage Affaire – one of the Bay Area’s premiere wine auctions which benefits Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
First project, redesign the logo and craft the save the date postcard.
SIGNAGE FOR NUEVA SCHOOL’S INTERSESSION
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working with Hope Patricia Daly Public Relations on a class catalog and signage for Nueva School’s annual Intersession. Intersession is a two week “experimental and intellectual feast” which engages the students in an interactive way on topics not found in typical high schools. I’ve pasted a capture of one of the posters we made so you can see some of the amazing seminars and activities offered.
Thanks, Hope, for bringing us into this eye-opening project.
A BIG DAY
It’s a big day! A busy day! We launched our new website and we signed and sealed Happy New Year cards to our clients, friends and associates.
TEAR-OFF REFERRAL CARD
We worked with a new printer, PrintingForLess.com, to make this referral card.
Referral cards are difficult. They need to be small enough that someone would carry it around. Nice enough that people will pass them onto their friends. They need to track the giver and the receiver so that the rewards can be passed on and so you can track your ROI.
Our client has been handing these out all holiday season. We’re looking forward to finding out if they do bring in new clients – it’s a great offer for the giver and receiver, so they should.
YOU TUBE CHANNELS AND VIDEO
YouTube is the second largest search engine. Make sure you have a channel — optimized and hosting your optimized videos. We’ve set up a few: Halo Blow Dry Bar Channel and Palace Cafe and Catering Channel.
But keep in mind that you have to either create your own videos or have copyright permission from the owner of the video to post to your channel.
We recently came across videos hosted within Vimeo and embedded on a client’s site. But we recommend YouTube over this. Vimeo puts a link to their site in the footer of the video, so you could potentially lose a visitor to the Vimeo playlist. Plus, with YouTube being the second largest search engine in the world, going with Vimeo does not seem to make sense.
The specs for the header graphic (see above) can be tricky as it needs to render from smartphone to desktop to TV and all devices in-between.
And even better for search engine optimization and for visitor engagement, be sure you add any video to your site, as we have done with this Palace Cafe & Catering video of wine pairings, appetizers, and setting the perfect event. Once you have created and posted your own videos to your YouTube channel they can be embedded on your website which saves you money — no need for custom coding — since you can generate the code to embed right from your YouTube channel.
OWN YOUR NEWS – PDF VS. OUT-GOING LINK
It’s great marketing to be mentioned in print. But if you simply link to the online version of the article, you are not getting the full benefit of the piece.
When you link to the article or post on the publishing website:
• You are directing your visitor off of your site where you can lose them to the distractions of ads, other articles, post comments, or mentions of your competition. (Look at all the distractions in the webpage capture of the article on the left side of our graphic above.)
• The publisher may remove or change the link at any time. Your article is lost and you have a dead link on your site. (BTW, if you do go this route of simply linking to an article, put a reminder in your calendar for a few times a year to test all the links on your site so you can fix any that are broken.)
• Out-going links do not help search engine optimization (SEO) at all.
We recommend putting the content of the article to a PDF which is uploaded to your website’s server. That way, you can control the content and remove ads, mentions of your competitors, and all distractions (see the clean article on the right side of the graphic above.) You always have possession of the story. And while PDFs may not be optimized for SEO the way a regular web page may be, they do help SEO.
To see samples:
HAWAII ISLAND ENERGY COOPERATIVE Click on any of the articles on this page.
SKINSPIRIT SKINCARE CLINIC AND SPA In this PDF, we removed all distractions, including mentions of our client’s competitors. Here, we highlighted the relevant information and greyed-out the rest of the article. Note that the URLs show the page is on our clients server.
HPD PUBLIC RELATIONS Here, we integrated press articles with items related to this event: postcard and poster (MPS designed and produced), photos, social media, blog posts, and the press release put out by our client, Hope Patricia Daly.
Send John a line for more information.
LAW FIRM WEBSITE LAUNCHED
We recently finished this simple website for Marsten & Mosher An Association of Attorneys. Check it out at: mmfamilylaw.com.
They elected to do a simple site with a separate mobile version. Their goals for this site where simple: allow clients to easily find their offices for meetings and provide a resource for those looking for the lawyers’ biographies.
They do so well from word-of-mouth marketing that they asked for only basic SEO work.
Thank you for the project, Mia and Michelle!