Webbright is very pleased to welcome Cindy Martin to the Bright Team. Cindy comes with more than 14 years experience in sales, marketing and product management. Cindy is currently a graphic design student at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has been a resident of Richmond for more than 20 years. She will help introduce Webbright to the market in the local community.
The Very Busy Spider
The very busy spider is a very nice book that I enjoy reading to my kids. It talks about all these farm animals who come asking the spider to come and play with them all day; however, “the spider doesn’t answer. She is busy spinning her web.”
Likewise, at Webbright we have been very quietly busy working on business development and new website services for our clients. We expect 2010 to be a very busy and exciting year for us!
Tags: webbright consuling news
I’ve just finished taking the Inbound Marketing Certification Exam this morning after attending a week long of excellent webinar series including:
- How to Blog Effectively for Business
- SEO Crash Course to Get Found
- Social Media and Building Community
- Successful Business Uses for Facebook and LinkedIn
- Viral Marketing and World Wide Raves
- Advanced SEO Tactics: On Beyond Keyword Research
- Calls to Action and Landing Page Best Practices
- Inbound Lead Nurturing
- Successful Email Marketing
- Analyzing Inbound Marketing
- Inbound Marketing Exam Review
- Inbound Marketing Exam Review
All webinars were recorded and are available on-demand. Slideshows are also available for review.
My favorite presenter: David Meerman Scott, author of New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave. His free eBook called The New Rules of Viral Marketing is on my reading list (and downloaded to my harddrive). Rand Fishkin wish SEOMoz is also a very energized and entertaining speaker.
My favorite topics were: “Calls to Action and Landing Page Best Practices” presented by Jeanne Hopkins, MECLABS and “Inbound Lead Nurturing” presented by Brian Caroll from InTouch.
I feel absolutely enlightened. Can’t wait to use this knowledge to help my clients and Web Bright Consulting with their marketing strategy.
Tags: inbound marketing
Do you feel your marketing efforts are not generating the leads you want?
Frustrated spending money on advertisement that doesn’t seem to work?
Inbound Marketing might be what you need!
“Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.
In traditional marketing (outbound marketing) companies focus on finding customers. They use techniques that are poorly targeted and that interrupt people. They use cold-calling, print advertising, T.V. advertising, junk mail, spam and trade shows.
Technology is making these techniques less effective and more expensive. Caller ID blocks cold calls, TiVo makes T.V. advertising less effective, spam filters block mass emails and tools like RSS are making print and display advertising less effective. It’s still possible to get a message out via these channels, but it costs more.
Inbound Marketers flip outbound marketing on its head.
Instead of interrupting people with television ads, they create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they create their own blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, they create useful content and tools so that people call them looking for more information.
Instead of driving their message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like a magnet.” -Inbound Marketing & the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web.
Mike Volpe, Marketing VP with HubSpot, is promoting the Inbound Marketing concept, and he is putting his words to action by using the Inbound Marketing concept to promote his company. HubSpot, founded in 2007 has grown in 3 years to 90 employees and 14,000+ customers! HubSpot software is a web-based system for small and medium sized businesses implementing Inbound Marketing.
For more information on HubSpot and Inbound Marketing visit:
Tags: inbound marketing
Web Bright Consulting has currently re-located to Ricmond Virginia and is very excited about the potential of the new location and it’s proximity to the DC aea.
We are very pleased to announce the Commonwealth Club as our first Virginia client and look forward to serving many more throughout the coming years.
Best wishes,
Lamees Abourahma
Founder & Web Consultant
Tags: webbright consuling news
What’s a link? This is a link to Botanica U.S.A., Inc.. Links are either internal or external. Links within a website are called internal links, while links coming from another website are called backlinks or external links. Google considers a link to a website as a vote. The more links and the better the quality and relevance of the links are (e.g., links from highly authoritative websites), the higher ranking Google gives a website and the more traffic it will send it. The fact that this post is linking to Botanica U.S.A. is good, but better yet is a link from a related and well-established site or directory. Building high quality links to a website is part of search engine optimization: techniques and strategy applied to a site to improve its visibility and ranking with search engines.
The text used in a link is called an anchor text. Anchor text is also an important factor in search engine optimization. For example, between the following two anchor texts:
the later is a better choice because of the descriptive keywords- in addition to the brand name.
To learn more about Search Engine Optimization or for consultation, subscribe to this blog or contact Web Bright Consulting.
This is my hand-picked, very favorite, top 10 11 12 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) resources:
- http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/: Google’s Webmaster Help Center with basic and essential information on the subject. After all, isn’t best to hear it from the horse’s mouth?
- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html: (This actually the 12th resource I had to update this post for.) Google’s SEO Starter Guide published in November 2008 and has the same information teams within Google use.
- www.webmasterradio.fm: Internet radio, podcasts for marketing and SEO. I’m hocked on this site. It’s very cool to listen to the industries top players and get a glimpse of the industries hot events from the convenience of one’s own work station.
- www.searchenginewatch.com: Search Engine Marketing Tips & Search Engine News. This is one of my first sites I found on SEO and has been great to find many other resources.
- www.searchengineland.com: Search Engine Marketing resource is run by Danny Sullivan- one of the biggest rockstars of this industry. If you’re learning about SEO and haven’t heard about Danny Sullivan, you haven’t learned enough yet!
- www.sempo.org: Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. Find online training resources and check out the Learning Center; I also like their webinar series.
- www.ask-kalena.com: The Daily Search Advice Column by Kalena Jordan, founder and tutor of Search Engine College. Kalena has been my SEO mentor since I took SEO 201 from Search Engine College.
- www.searchenginecollege.com: Fun, easy and affordable online short courses in search engine optimization (SEO) and other search engine marketing subjects. check out my other posts: SEO Certification by Search Engine College and I’m now SEO Certified
- www.bruceclay.com: SEO and SEM consulting service with a lot of useful information on the subject
- www.searchenginestrategies.com: Global conference & expo series with education and exhibition on search engine marketing
- http://searchmarketingexpo.com/: similar to the above conference in focus; programmed by Danny Sullivan & Chris Sherman
- http://www.highrankings.com/: this site contains great article on search engine optimization essentials.
If you have others that you absolutely love, feel free to share in the comment section!
Note: This article was first posted on June 14, 2008.
It’s interesting to see how traditional marketing is phasing-out and new -mainly online marketing- is gaining popularity.
During our Chirstmas visit to the Sea Pines in Hilton Head, SC my family and I were in the mood for Italian food. As with most other vacation accommodation we had a stack of flyers and magazine on places to eat and things to do. A magazine of places to eat is typically loaded with pictures of delicious food that makes your mouth watery; however, the magazine did not have an index or categories to search by cuisine type. I quickly turned to my laptop, did a Google search on “where people go for intalian food in hilton head”. One of the top search results was from TripAdvisor.com for the Stellini Italian Restaurant. The site has a popularity index for restaurants in the area (Stellini was ranked 29/212), address, phone number, map, and customer reviews and feedback. All I was looking for and more. Guess how I’m finding the best pizza place to dine during my next trip? I added TripAdvisor.com to my delicious.com bookmarks and told friends and family about it.
Do you have another story you like to share about online marketing vs traditional marketing? I’d love to hear it. Leave me a comment!
Just in case you’re wondering whether or not to start a blog:
The following is a synopsis from a real job ad that you can expect to see more of:
“[Employer] don’t do resumes. Just email them at … and tell them what you’re passionate about and send them a link to your blog or web site”.
Tags: blogging
I’m very pleased with what I was able to accomplish last year since I stared Web Bright Consulting to practice web design and online marketing, and very excited about what next year will hold!
Lamees’ business goals for 2009:
- Work on my Mketing and Sales Skills
- Gain more experience with SEO
- Study Social Media and learn its development tools
- Add more online marketing skills to my Skill Tools
- Establish more partnership relations
To follow my work progress and get some information on the above areas: subscribe to my blog feed or email and keep reading!
And now for a reflection on 2008
Early in 2008, I was very fortunate to meet Mr. Jeff Hanson (Founder and President of Hanson Safety Inc.) and have the chance to help him develop a “professional and vibrant website that will serve South Carolina veterans for years to come”. You can visit the site at: www.SupportSCVeterans.org. This was an amazing project where I could contribute a lot of ideas and new services including copywriting, video production, search engine optimization (seo), email marketing, blogging, and online donation. I also enjoyed working with the talented and nice people who helped put this project together. The project is documented in this showcase article.
Thanks to my friend Leyla Mason, last year I got into Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a very “hot” area in the field of Search Marketing and Online Marketing in general. Leyla (co-founder of the Center for Carolina Living) brought SEO to my attention a year ago and I thought it would complement my web design services and add great value to my clients. In May, I completed an Advanced Search Engine Optimization Certification from SearchEngineCollege.com and in October, I attended Search Marketing Expo (SMX East) in New York. I am now helping Leyla and her team optimizing their site www.CarolinaLiving.com for search engines and making their site a state-of-the-art, just like their magazine is.
I’m also proud of the work I did for a couple of my pioneer clients: www.TheSummitClub.com and www.RichlandSertomaClub.org to “bring them to the 21st century”, as Jeff called it.
Last but not least, I was very delighted to meet great people along the way, some who turn into partners, clients or even advocates; meeting great people is the thing I cherish the most about this experience.
And now for the Oscar moment… I’d like to thank my biggest cheerleaders, my mom and my sister, my rock, my husband Eric, and my two real bosses, my two kids Farris and Nadine for their continued support and love.
Best wishes and Happy New Year!
Lamees Abourahma
Web Bright Consulting
Tags: webbright consuling news