If there’s any time to dream up a theme for your marketing, it’s NOW, before the holidays hit. Yes, we’re only just approaching fall… but before you know it, the malls will be decked with holly and teeming with Santa Clauses. Are you prepared for the deluge of competition?

Large corporations begin planning for their holiday campaign launches in the thick of summer!

Here’s a Christmas toy catalog cover that I worked on “back in the day.” I’m quite certain that the air conditioning in my cubicle was kicking when I wrote this.

Your holiday marketing event needn’t be an expensive or time-consuming affair. With a little creative input from you, Wordfeeder.com can help you launch a holiday campaign like this to drive more business in December!

So, the holiday season looms, and with competition fierce in a tough economy, it’s time to get out there, get known, and get more clients. Here are some holiday ideas you can implement in a hurry…………

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Popularity: 24% [?]

Okay, so the Wayback Machine is not nearly as cool as Christopher Lloyd’s DeLorean… but I must admit, having an archive that “takes you back” to prior versions of your website can come in handy.

The Wayback Machine is also known as the “internet archive” and you can find it at http://www.archive.org/index.php. It’s great for those days when you’re feeling sentimental and want to “go back in time” to see how far your website has evolved.

I’ll give you a peek at the “awfulness” that was Wordfeeder.com circa 2004:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040208163833/http://www.wordfeeder.com/

YIKES! Look at that wretched template that I borrowed from Trellix… and how about that godawful pun at the bottom of the page?

(Go ahead and try it; type your URL right into the box at the top right of the page… and see how far you’ve come in the world of business website design!)

One thing I must emphasize: the Wayback Machine has a much greater value than looking at old versions of your website and laughing your head off. I’ve found it to be a lifesaver when you accidentally delete a page from your server and want to “recover” old copy and/or images that have been lost.

Even if the copy isn’t an exact duplicate of what you needed, having an earlier version is still MUCH better than having to start from scratch.

The Wayback Machine is also useful for when you want to learn more about people who you might be working with in the future.

Bookmark The Wayback Machine so you’ll have it when you need it.

Popularity: 26% [?]

by Dina Giolitto

Suppose you paid thousands to have a professionally branded website designed from scratch. What’s the one element that can make or break your sales? The words! Yes, you’ve heard it before - your message to the customer means everything.

Oh, you already know that? Well, that’s terrific. And now let me tell you something you probably didn’t know. Remember the part where your designer asked you if you wanted “search engine optimization” - and you said no thanks, because your bank account had just been drained?

THAT is where you went astray, and lost out on myriad opportunities to get your brand and message in front of all those clamoring, salivating prospects. And that’s what’s REALLY keeping you and the people who want to buy your stuff from ever crossing paths.

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Popularity: 20% [?]

If you’re a user of Google AdWords then pay close attention. Google has announced that they will now begin adding landing page load time to your AdWord rank score.

According to Google, people who have web sites with slow-loading pages will be charged more for their Google AdWords advertisements.

There are several ways to reduce the loading times of your pages.

• Cut down the graphics. Graphic files take up a lot of bandwidth even with today’s high-speed connections. If your site depends on graphic intensity, then make sure you optimize your images to minimize load times.
• Take a written approach. While graphics slow down load times, text seems to have little effect, so making pages that are heavy on the copy are to your advantage. They load fast and, if properly optimized, will help your page ranking.
• Avoid Flash animations. Flash animations are definitely cool, but also eat up bandwidth faster than Iron Man eats up WD-40.
• Avoid embedded objects. YouTube videos, photo slide shows and other items that you embed into your pages increase the amount of information that has to be sent, which causes your pages to load more slowly.

Studies show that if a page doesn’t load within 8 seconds, people go somewhere else. So optimizing your web pages for better load times will not only help your Google AdWord bottom line, but will provide a better experience for your readers.

Read the full story here.

Michael Sieber is professional web content writer. Visit his site at prowebwriting.com.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Dogs and bees, and freelancers, can smell fear. As someone who writes copy and produces marketing materials on a freelance basis, I can tell within five minutes of talking to a potential customer whether their fear of being overcharged will set the tone for our work together. I can also assure you that there are ways to retain quality and get good turnaround time on projects without being run through the wringer.

Some facts and suggestions on how to get the most bang for your outsourced buck:

Know that the freelancer is just as interested in being quick and efficient as you are.

People who are new to outsourcing might view me (the copywriting consultant) as someone who would try to milk them out of their last dime while dragging the project on forever. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Established freelancers typically juggle multiple projects at once. It makes much better business sense for us to complete two projects for two happy clients in two days, then deliver one project for one client in two days and have that client feel uneasy about the amount of time we spent on their work.

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Popularity: 87% [?]

Not everyone in the world has a high-speed internet connection, and even those who do can’t always see web pages where the images are larger than 30KB.

So if you’ve noticed that sometimes it takes longer than you’d like for your site to load; or, if you’ve observed a high bounce rate (you get clicks, but visitors leave quickly), it may be because you need to shrink your image files.

You don’t have to shrink the actual width and height of your images to reduce the size of the files. What you can do instead, is export them to a compressed size - a .jpg or .gif file. I know how to do this in Adobe Fireworks (this is the image editing program that comes with the Dreamweaver suite). If you use other programs such as Photoshop or Gimp, you’ll have to maybe do a Google search on “image compression.”

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Popularity: 57% [?]

Do you want to learn how to design your own website, but you’re paralyzed by fear and immobilized by the sheer volume of choices and conflicting advice? Listen up, I think you may find this information useful.

When I first took my copywriting business to the web, I had no idea what I was doing. I knew I had to have a website if I wanted to get clients, but I was going about it the wrong way, using that antiquated Trellix SiteBuilder program that Earthlink offers with their web hosting package. That program is an incredibly convoluted way to work; do not use it.

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Popularity: 17% [?]