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Website for album of music inspired by Antarctica

Published on: September 9, 2019Category: Red Carpet Web News

Just finished designing and developing the website for long time client Valmar Kurol and his collaborator Michael Stibor for their new album inspired by Antarctica. Check out their site: https://www.symphonyantarctica.com

They wrote:
“So I just checked out the website. I LOVE it! It’s so great. I love how interactive it is. And I love that you put the music right there on the website, and then divided it by movement. You did a superb job!” – Michael Stibor

“Great web site presentation of the CD and its story. It looks very clean, crisp and elegant. The music samples and corresponding track notes are convenient to play and read. Thanks for making this so free of clutter.” – Valmar Kurol

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ArtistsInspire Grants Website Launch

Published on: June 14, 2019Category: Red Carpet Web News

Implementing this web strategy was a collaboration between Christie Huff (Lead Consultant – ELAN’s Arts & Education Initiatives), Denis Piquette (Chemin Robinson Consulting) and Red Carpet Web Promotion. ArtistsInspire Grants  provide support to Quebec’s English-speaking Communities by connecting artists with schools to facilitate hands-on creative experiences, funded the Government of Canada’s Action Plan for Official Languages. ELAN and LEARN are collaborating to promote and support the ArtistsInspire Grants program.

Red Carpet Web Promotion and Chemin Robinson Consulting developed he web strategy from start to finish within a very short timeframe, including creating the name “ArtistsInspire Grants”, the logo, the website, email campaigns and more.  The website launched May 23, 2019.  Have a look here: www.artistsinspire.ca. The website includes a login for schools to apply for multiple-year grants as well as a login for approved artists to create and edit their profiles.  See the artists profiles here: https://artistsinspire.ca/artists/.

Thanks to everyone who worked on this project to make it a success!

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SEO Ranking Factors Analyzed

Published on: September 21, 2018Category: SEO Blog Comments: 0

It has been a while since I’ve seen a big switch in factors that affect search engine ranking. SEMRush has released a report based on the scope of 600,000+ keywords, in order analyze the importance of ranking factors.  The results are that the number of direct website visits to your site is the most important factor!  So basically sites that already have a lot of traffic from people typing the URL in the address bar will rank higher in results. This is hard to take for someone trying to improve ranking by adjusting the website – as it is not an on-site factor.  But it makes sense that Google would show the most popular sites at the top.

Other factors that score higher than total referring domains are:

  1. Time on site
  2. Pages per session
  3. Bounce rate

So if your site is engaging and people spend more time on it you also stand to benefit with a higher ranking.

The take away from this is that anything that could increase your direct visits will also increase your visits from organic search  because more direct visits will increase your position in search results.

See the report here: https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors/

Ranking Factors Analyzed

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Call to Action in Video Ads

Published on: September 10, 2018Category: Ad Marketing Comments: 0

If video ads in Facebook and YouTube are part of your marketing mix, here are some tips on how to edit the end of your ad.

 

Facebook Video Ads

After the video ad ends, Facebook overlays a call to action in the middle of your video.  One can choose the call to action text and link in the video ad settings.  So for the last frame be sure not to have anything important in the centre of the frame.  I suggest putting your logo and any text that you want to include (like a slogan) at the top or bottom.  Keep the end short as the call to action from Facebook only appears after the video ends, so there is no point lingering on a long end frame making the user have to wait to click.

YouTube Ads

Youtube has many options for videos, this is a general tip for ads that users can click on to visit a URL. it is important to have a call to action and you can even write “click here” as part of your call to action to let users know what action to take.  I recommend keeping this ending of your video with your logo and call to action for at least 4 seconds.

 

Let me know if you have any comment or other tips based on your experience.

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Fastbase Webleads for Google Analytics

Published on: July 19, 2018Category: Ad Marketing Comments: 3

There is a new service for finding out the company name, contact name and email address and other information of website visitors. It is an add-on to Google analytics offered by Fastbase.com.  There is a free trial which lists leads to your site for the last 12 months.  Here is the pricing page: https://analytics.fastbase.com/Pricing. The catch is that you have to login to your Google Analytics account and share your Analytics data with Fastbase. I do not know how they will monetize on having this data but it is valuable so I am sure they will do well!

I did a test for one of my clients and downloaded a list of 728 leads with a date range of 12 months. this is out of a total of 27,543 users to the site over the same date range. It remains to be tested to see if these leads are any good, but it could be a powerful tool for B2B websites. An extension on remarketing: rather than just showing ads to people who have been on your site you can actually contact them by email, phone or mail.

Out of the 728 leads, 623 had email addresses. I ran this list through zerobounce.com to get an idea of how many of the emails are valid (it is processing,  I will include an update in comments.) It might be interesting to send out an email blast to this list to see what kind of interest you get.

Please leave comments if you have tried this service, have feedback or are interested in receiving these lead reports.

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Facebook Making Changes to Newsfeed

Published on: January 16, 2018Category: Ad Marketing

On January 11, 2018 Facebook announced a major change to their newsfeed that would show less posts from businesses and more posts from friends and family that are considered meaningful to users.

This is a big concern to business who use Facebook as a marketing tool. The good news for businesses is that this will not affect advertising, but it will affect regular posts.

Post vs. Boosted Post

As a business you can make a post and it will be seen by about 20% of users who like your page. Posts with more engagement including comments will show more often and to more users. What companies typically must do to reach a larger audience, including more of the users who like their page but also users targeted by interests and other factors is pay to promote the post. Promoted posts will also show in newsfeeds and will not be affected by the recent changes. In addition to promoted posts, advertisers can also show ads including image ads, video ads, carousel ads and other ad formats right in the newsfeed. These are considered “ads” and would not be affected by the recent newsfeed algorithm changes.

The bad news is that businesses who use facebook as a marketing tool without paying for ads will reach less people. Posts made by businesses will have to be much more engaging now in order to be seen in newsfeeds given the recent change. Or, businesses will have to pay to boost them or set them up as ads.

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See Mark Zuckerbergs full post:

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104413015393571