[Photo credit: Happy Birthday Candles on Angel Foods Cake by Rob J Brooks, on Flickr]

Do enough people know about your website? It can and should be your most powerful marketing tool, delivering a steady stream of new visitors and pushing your message to a wider audience.

Increase your cyber-reach without over-burdening yourself by performing one small task a day throughout March with our Task-a-Day Website Promotion Checklist.

This freebie is part of our year-long birthday celebration. We’re celebrating our 10th year by giving out presents to YOU. This one is coming at you from now until March 31. Hurry, though, because after the 31st, it will be gone. Make sure to check in for our April birthday surprise.

[This little gem is the e-mail newsletter our subscribers just received. Want a slice of this for yourself? Sign up now.]

Things Just Got Cheaper

We really don’t have to make our Websites 1-2-3 any cheaper, but we are anyway! Now you can have a fully functional, super-powered website with your colors and pictures for just $1599. Check it out.

Need more? Supersize it for $1999 and get sign-up forms and e-newsletters.

Want to go all out? Pick from our library of add-ons, including calendars, blogs – the sky’s the limit.

Of course, we do fully custom websites, too – just let us know if you have something specific in mind and we’ll bring it to life.

Signed,
Your Internet Pals at Talance

[This little gem is the e-mail newsletter our subscribers just received. Want a slice of this for yourself? Sign up now.]

Digging for Website Gold

Too many people think the best content they have to offer on their websites are event listings. Sure, those are helpful, but you almost certainly have something better you’re already producing that you can use to make your website a better resource. Here are some ideas to help you dig up hidden content:

Newsletter. It may be printed, or an e-newsletter you’re sending out via a third-party service, but chances are someone has written articles that can be used somewhere on your website.

Sermons. Congregations we work with are always producing some kind of spiritual thoughts worth sharing, including sermons and prayers.

Employee reports. Most companies have regular staff meetings where employees give status reports, and many of these reports center around special events and campaigns.

E-mail. Everybody writes e-mails, and some of the stuff you send out must be applicable to the people who visit your website. Look through your sent messages for treasures.

Training. Many organizations have manuals stacked on office bookshelves that contain useful information. Translate that online, and it can be more accessible to the people who need to see it.

Think creatively about where you look for content, and your website will be a richer place.

[Photo credit: 10 by Phae, on Flickr]

It’s the second month of our 10th year anniversary bash, and we’ve just kicked off a new deal. From now until February 28, get 10% off anything.

Yup, anything.

This one only lasts for a month. Click here and start saving. Hurry!

[This little gem is the e-mail newsletter our subscribers just received. Want a slice of this for yourself? Sign up now.]

Hi, Friends.

We’ve got some great tips for you in this year’s very last issue of Talance’s Friendly E-Newsletter for improving your website and online communications strategy:

• Start with our article on how to define your audience (including the most useful questions you’ll have to ask to do so).
• Sign up for our new Websites 1-2-3 package – super powerful websites for your organization that don’t take a super-sized budget (only $1999!).
• Read through highlights from our favorite advice that we picked up on Twitter.
• Find out what everybody loved from our blog in the last month.

Wishing all our friends happy holidays!

From,

Your Internet pals at Talance

Catch is not a one-person game. That game is called Throw the Ball in the Middle of a Field, and it’s no fun.

The same principle applies to launching a new website – you have to have someone to aim to, otherwise, you can expect poor results. That’s why your first step with designing a new website should be to determine your target audience(s) so you can customize your site for them.

How? Start asking questions and see what answers emerge. You can consult whatever demographics information (age range, gender, geography, education, income, hobbies) you already have, and then see if you can develop a clearer profile by asking these questions:

1. What does a typical volunteer/supporter/member look like?
2. What does an ideal volunteer/supporter/member look like?
3. What do many of our volunteers/supporters/members have in common?
4. When we started, who did we have in mind as a volunteer/supporter/member?

You’ll see what a huge difference it makes just knowing why you’re building. And your website visitors will appreciate it too.

Websites 1-2-3 gives you an easy to edit website – fast! Get started with a clean, super-powered website hosted on the Drupal content management system (CMS). Then load it up with a selection of free goodies (like a blog or interactive calendar – or both!). Then sit back while we bring it all together with your custom colors, pictures and logo.

It really is that easy.

» Click here to get started!

In honor of our new offering for congregations, here are some highlights from the Talance Friendly Web Tools Blog. Make sure you’re reading http://talance.com/blog and get automatic updates of new articles.

Reader Question: How Do I Add a Facebook Page to My Page’s Favorites?

How To Start a Blog in 14 Steps for Congregations

21 Ways Volunteers Can Help with Your Website

How to Scrap Your Paper Bulletin

How To Write Really Helpful Web Development RFPs

These are our most-clicked and most discussed postings on Twitter. Want to see what we have to say? Follow us: http://twitter.com/talance.

• For those of you wondering what Facebook Connect is “What’s More Awesome than Sharing? Publishing, with Facebook Connect” http://ow.ly/Ffco
• So much interesting info about Twitter, from Pew Internet & American Life Project http://ow.ly/BVKw
• From @rabbijason, on expanding your marketing message with voice mail messages: How about “We’re not in right now, but u can send us a message on Twitter or write a message on a paper airplane & throw it to us.”
• From @katzpdx You are 100% correct. [Social media] should be treated as another marketing channel/tactic

Need Some Help?

Talance has helped clients launch scores of projects, ranging from websites to online newsletters to CRM projects. Please click here to schedule a time to talk about your next project or to request a proposal.

Find Us Fast

Read About Talance

Receive the newsletter. Subscribe Now!

Join Talance on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

Don’t keep this good stuff all to yourself. Click that Forward button and send to a friend.

Here on this very last day of 2008, I thought I’d take a look back at the Friendly Web Tools blog entries over the year and share with you those that generated the most responses and feedback. Read, enjoy and happy New Year!

1. Really Deleting What’s on Your Computer
2. Good advice on asking for a new website
3. Careful When Throwing Away Computers
4. Importance of Needs Assessment
5. Killer Church Websites
6. 3 Antidotes to Human Stupidity
7. Best in Social Networks
8. Excellent Tool for Identifying Fonts
9. Gadget Monday: Big Zip-Topped Bag for Cables When Traveling
10. Understanding the Size of Gen Y

When going over the designs for his website, a client of mine said, “If we put our newsletter on our website, why do we need to e-mail it to people too?”

My answer: “Because they don’t know it’s there!”

It’s a very common question, and a common misconception. Just because you build a website doesn’t mean that anyone knows it’s there. And it’s not a guarantee they’ll come.

In fact, people are fickle. You have to beat them over the head to make them visit your site, and then you have to make it easy for them to read your site, navigate your site and anticipate what they’re looking for.

All this takes a lot of research into knowing your audience and working with a company that understands the way humans interact with technology, but here are a few tips and tools you can follow to help bring people to your site and help keep them there:

Learn SEO. Make sure you write the copy on your site to attract the most people and the most search engines with search engine optimization (SEO). We’re hosting a free online seminar on this topic on August 5, 2008, so sign up to learn how.

Send a Newsletter. If you didn’t have an electronic newsletter before, get one now. Publishing news regularly gives you a chance to connect with your audience and connect to them while they’re at their computer. That’s the best time for them to click through to your website. We build newsletters into our content management systems, but many independent companies provide powerful newsletter tools, such as Constant Contact.

Advertise Widely and Often. Advertise your site everywhere. On your invoices, business cards, sticky notes, voice mail recordings, newsletters – everywhere. Slap your URL on it. VistaPrint is one of many companies that provides cheap promotional materials that you can use for advertising.

Visitors to the Talance website are split 50-50 between Internet Explorer users and Firefox users. I wonder how many of the Firefox users are really using the Web browser to their full potential.

The true benefit of Firefox is the add-on. An add-on is a feature or tool that you can download to work in conjunction with your Firefox web browser. Here’s a nice article from the Boston Globe about how Firefox works.

Here at Talance HQ, we have a million of these installed, but two that we like for nonprofits or any user are:

• Effortless Good, which donates a bit of your Amazon purchases to needy causes
• Adblock Plus to suppress annoying web ads
• Since you’ve supressed annoying commercial ads, you might replace them with openhanded, which replaces standard Gmail ads with charitable ones
• InFormEnter, which makes web forms easy to fill out

To find more, check out the always interesting and useful ResourceShelf blog has a list of the most useful add-ons to use with Firefox.

And Lifehacker is always running articles on useful Firefox extensions.

Let me know which ones you like best.

Volunteers are a gift to a nonprofit website. The problem is, well, they’re volunteers. You’re counting on them to help out, but you’ve got respect their time and other limitations. A salary is a powerful incentive you can’t use with a volunteer.

It’s a chronic limitation for synagogue websites. The webmaster for a New York-based synagogue was talking about this with me the other day. She said, “One of the biggest challenges, of course, is that the site is managed on a fully volunteer basis and there is only so much time I can devote to it.”

We effectively face the same challenge with Talance’s company website – we squeeze in enhancements between other client projects. But knowing that anyone who comes to our website forms judgments on the quality of work we do based on what they see there, we also know it’s vitally important to keep performing upgrades.

My solution is to set up what equates to a project management checklist with a priority number next to each task and put it in a central location. Whenever a team member (including myself) has a bit of free time, we just pick something off the list and do it. It seems easier to attack in bite-sized bits, and things do eventually get done.

We have our own project management software we use, but you might look at Google Calendars and Docs & Spreadsheets for hosting a centrally accessible spreadsheet you can use for a tasklist. I think simpler is always better when it comes to tracking a project.

Let me know if you’ll be in Boston for Drupalcon 2008 – I’d love to meet you. I’m on the planning committee for the event and am helping to organize. If you’ll be in town, let me know, and I’ll be happy to see you there! http://groups.drupal.org/boston2008