Candle Hats and Christmases: Season’s Greetings from Signalwrite Marketing.

In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
Rembrandt looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
from painting The Blinding of Sampson.

But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror
and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio
addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew
we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head
which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,
a device that allowed him to work into the night.

You can only wonder what it would be like
to be wearing such a chandelier on your head
as if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

But once you see this hat there is no need to read
any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

To understand Goya you only have to imagine him
lighting the candles one by one, then placing
the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,
the laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house
with all the shadows flying across the walls.

Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door
one dark night in the hill country of Spain.
“Come in,” he would say, “I was just painting myself,”
as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,
illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

This Billy Collins poem appeared in the mid-1990s. Always a great favorite or mine, its message is pointedly related to the holiday wishes from Signalwrite this year.

Its warm-hearted sense of humor, about one of the world’s great artists who was himself known for a sense of self-amusement, is just right for wishing my clients and colleagues, family and friends a wonderful Christmas season and an outstanding 2012.

Signalwrite Marketing’s professional and personal life have been filled with laughter and you have all played a part in it. The number of adventures, conversations, meetings, programs, and visits during which laughter broke out is uncountable…but pretty large.

“Laughing like a birthday cake” has made my professional life wonderful. Merry Christmas to everyone. May you keep it in your hearts all year long. Happy New Year too, when all good things will come to you and bad ones never appear.

Next Christmas, let’s plan on getting together and wearing candle hats. For now, the very best of the holiday season.

Goya: “Self-portrait in the studio” (c. 1790-1795). Oil on canvas, 42 x 28 cm. Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Madrid, Spain). See No 20 here. Minor photo: Stellan Skarsgård from Warner Bros film “Goya’s Ghosts.”

Pea-Finding Maximizers Improve Your Odds: SEO Tricks You Can Use Right Now.

One problem I face creating a new website is in the buzzy realm of SEO – Search Engine Optimization, right? Maybe I am branding the company. Maybe I’m crafting content for a new or revised site. In all cases, it is now a challenge – and good client service – to get the new site’s page ranking higher on Google and other search engines.

How to find and use the right search terms in copy, if you’re a marketer or copywriter? How to build them into your website, if you’re an in-house graphic designer or a outsource coder?

These days we pay more attention because the Internet’s a shell game. The complexity and competition of the worldwide web are the shells; your website’s optimized efficiency is the pea. Discover the pea and you win more…eyeballs. But the pea is elusive. You need more than guesswork. You need pea-finding maximizers.

I always try to find and use a set of current practices when creating a site. (“Current” is important because the game changes all the time.)

That’s just what I’ve done over the past few days. I completed a website’s content with the extra help of 11 simple but effective tricks. I learned – or re-learned – them at a Search Engine Optimization lunch seminar last week. The good people* at CITOC brought Toronto-based Stuart Crawford, President and Chief Marketing Officer at Ulistic, to lead the instruction.

Here’re my current pea-finding maximizers.

1. Start with a tight-and-right marketing plan. Every great website is based on one. Getting it nailed is harder than it looks. And it’s also where you evaluate key words and search terms.

I sharpen this by building in brand-related words, too – important when the client’s marcomms will help push customers and prospects to the new site: not just “oilfield sand screens,” for example, but “open hole expandable sand screens.”

2.  Use text and lots of it. (or Department of Music to a Copywriter’s Ears). Google searches text. The more of it there is on a website, the greater the opportunity for search programs to spot your key words.

3.  Optimize for where you do business. Adjust your website(s) to relate to prospects locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. All of these if you do business globally.

Searches that are effective in Hong Kong or Heidelberg may not work as well in Houston and vice versa – key phrases may be completely different from region to region. Example: “combat boots” in the US, “military boots” in the UK.

4.  Search engines work even better with “current events.” The fresher the news the better off your website is, search engine-wise. Frequency of fresh news is also a strong attractor. Which leads to…

5.  Easy updating is crucial. However you can do it, you need to be able to change up news, events and other elements on your site quickly and easily. Whether you’re the one, or you have an outside resource do it, it has to be fast and simple. Make it so.

Okay – keep a clock on your IT department, your outside vendor or freelancer. The sooner the news release is posted, the sooner search engines can get to work. No, I don’t mean it has to be done this New York minute; “timely” is the right measurement here.

6.  Enjoy more wham! from your website title tag. If you can transmit a key word or key term in the website title, do it. Putting “Jones and Company” is way less effective than “Cheap Diamond Rings ׀ Jones and Company.”

Or look at Signalwrite.com where the upper left title tag starts with “Richard Laurence Baron.”  Then comes “Signalwrite” followed by “Marketing Copywriter Houston.” My brand is built on my three-part name. I want people to search for – and find – me. Thank you to Brian Bearden and Zephyr Salvo for constructing it this way.

7.  Put a Convert Button on every page. Do not lose the chance to call-to-action right where your readers may be stopping.

8.  Use PR releases for backlink to your site. More frequent publicity releases, even for in-company celebrations, can boost visits to your website…remember to put hotlinks into your PR every time.

9.  Then get OPWs to link to yours. That’s Other People’s Websites. Your partners, vendors, customers – either from some social media site(s) or their own websites…this will drive traffic to yours also. Don’t forget to return the favor.

10. Take massive advantage of Google Places. B2B or Retail, especially Retail – put up a separate Google Places listing for each store, office and facility. Don’t forget to check current address details.

11. Test and measure, test and measure. Keep using Google Analytics and other options to see how your newly effectorized website is doing. SEO needs some care and feeding, you just want to know what, where and when.

These are nowhere near all the SEO rules, tips and tricks. And unless your life is spent online, that means another kind of shell game for you to confront. How do you pick the right SEO person or firm to help you with this?

Maybe “test and measure” applies here, too. C’mon, can I get some opinions on this from real social media experts?

*Nota Bene (which means “note well”): Signalwrite-sized thanks with loud tropical shirts on to Citoc’s BJ Farmer and his team for timely and tasty learning; to Ulistic’s Crawford, taking advantage of Houston weather before snow-flying time comes to eastern Canada; and Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) who shows that finding the pea has been much harder than it looks for centuries. From Wikimedia Commons.

What Will Really Happen to Signalwriter’s Blogging Platform?

The word’s out – Google will “probably” rebrand the Blogger platform it bought along with previous owner Pyra Labs in 2003. Reader comments to one CNet report are mixed, but generally positive…some respondents rightly see the value in concentrating more attention in the overall Google brand.

That’s important to me because Blogger is where Signalwriter has been since I began writing it in 2005…it’s a long time in Internet years. I have been grateful to Blogger for a long time for enabling me to practice my craft (writing) and promote my brand (Signalwrite Marketing) in such a well-supported way. And did I mention, without cost?

The universe of blogging has grown so complex since I began, it’s unlikely if not impossible to have it neatly summed up. I won’t try, though I am considering a raucous beer bash for my blog’s 10th Anniversary. So just you stick around to see what happens in the next four years…it looks as though Google is going to keep changing everything, but I’ll keep the beer cold.

Operate Your Website for More than One Audience at a Time.

You’ll see this graphic when you go to Upstream Marketing’s revamped website. Principal Brian Bearden and I were looking for a way to simply show how many more audiences are affected by a company’s website than most businesspeople consider.

We drew an early version of the graphic on a prospect’s whiteboard. (It really wasn’t a blackboard – that’s so 20^th Century.) Even in the new website version, Bearden has kept the graphic expression simple.

The effects of the Web are indisputable; but listen, there are about 7.6 million businesses in the US alone (US Census, 2010). Which means that for every spectacularly savvy biz with a great website or two or three, there are maybe 10 or 15 that DO NOT realize all the impacts a website can have on their company’s sales, marketing and growth.

Effects on your audience(s) can be both positive and negative. So I view websites as “conversation changers.” Company managers can’t control every single conversation with a prospect, with an investment analyst, with a shareholder. Yet the website’s going to be the first place people go to have a conversation in both metaphorical and literal senses.

The graphic also imagines that some of the website’s exchanges ought to be two-way conversations, dialogues between you and customers, for example; or employees. Other interactions may be one-way: messages to prospects, perhaps, or trade press editors, at least to start with.

In a 50-word opening paragraph, the UpstreamMarketing.net “About” section says:

We believe that in today’s world more and more effective marketing and sales conversations start with the website. Your website. So our job is to build engaging, easy-to-use, industrial websites for process and manufacturing industries, engineering and service companies. Conversation-changers. Game-changers…the most effective sites – bar none.

I want you to be strategic about your website before you actually make changes, radical or not. SEO is important; content creation also. But deliberation counts for more. A thoughtless website can kill a sale.

The right website, one touched by human thinking, can change your sales or marketing or employee conversations for the better. This is provably true. The best websites can change your game.

To keep the total idea in mind, simple is what you can draw on a whiteboard.

PS: Having visualized this marvelous model, now I have to figure out how to apply it to my own Signalwrite.com site. I’ll get back to you on that.

Wellness Centers of America Launches – Using Blue Sky (and Wong and Me)…

With its first retail location opening soon, Wellness Centers of America reached out to Blue Sky Marketing for the go-to-market strategy and point-of-sale programs that’d power its initial launch and deliver success.

Blue Sky principal Michelle LeBlanc has focused on independent marketing strategic planning and business development. That’s just what she brought to the new program for Wellness Centers of America (called WCOA for the rest of this post). At the same time, LeBlanc had to meet the retail launch deadline with plenty of marketing communications executions, including TV, point-of-sale and marketing handouts.

For these, LeBlanc tapped Betty Wong Creative (Betty Wong) and Signalwrite Marketing Communications (c’est moi: Richard Laurence Baron) to develop initial graphic design platforms and copy positions.

I’ve been working on wellness projects and programs for the past 20 years. Only very recently have strong figures and trends been available to underscore the value of what some people describe as “the positive health of an individual as exemplified by quality of life.” The last time I covered wellness on this blog, I noted:

…wellness needs to be marketed as effectively as possible, from the aging of the American workforce to our cultural search for the Fountain of Youth.

This is under way with WCOA: effective wellness marketing at retail. I’ve had the opportunity to work under Blue Sky’s direction on WCOA branding and key selling points from the outset. You can see some of the POS expressions created by Wong and me at the top of the post.

There’s more: Dave Henry of iFilmProductions created TV in time for the Grand Opening, using personal-approach video storytelling to convey WCOA’s “Five Pillars of Wellness” offer.

The TV spot’s now running in the Atlanta area. The initial WCOA location is open in Deerfield Place Shopping Center – that’s in Alpharetta, GA, a northside ‘burb. And the entire effective retail marketing effort is supported by bright, fresh creative – including Wong’s sunny new logo mark.

Thanks to LeBlanc, Wong, Henry and WCOA for letting me play a role in this new retail effort. Believe me, promoting wellness is worth it.

Clue One: Snow Summons Harbingers of Signalwrite Client Gifts.

How could anyone imagine they’d be lurking in such numbers? Yet at the first sign of snow, here they come, their shining faces ready for the next critical step in the Signalwrite Marketing holiday gift program. Coming soon to a pair of welcoming client hands nearby: Hanukkah a week away and Christmas just around the corner.

What’s this year’s gift? Clue Two will be on Prism’s Use Your Bean blog on Monday. Maybe you’ll guess lucky and get a double helping of Something Special.

Dear HugeDomains.com: $995 is Too Much for this Blog Name – Ya Pirates.

I have missed the opportunity to make a lot of money. Again. Mainly because I wasn’t clever enough to [a] gobble up a bunch of neat url names and [b] hold them for ransom. Here’s what the “About” part of the pirates’ site says:

HugeDomains is a premium domain reseller site that strives to bring you brandable domains for your business at a fraction of the cost.

So this firm not only has Signalwriter (which is a brand name I invented) but also SignalDepot and SignalBay and – oh yes – HowToBeACopywriter. Dot com.

Still, fair is fair. I did create the Signalwriter name – it’s a trademark. But these folks thought hard enough about the subject to scoop it up and purchase the url before I (finally) got around to it. It is the part of the model of capitalism to offer for sale something that people want to buy.

I therefore admit to sour grapes. Arrrh!

(At least HugeDomains.com does not own www.sourgrapes.com – that’s a Warner Bros url.)

Signalwriter Marketing Blog is the property of Richard Laurence Baron. “Signalwriter” and “Signalwrite” are trademarks. All rights reserved. Painting: Muti, jene Trauben sind sauer, Joris van Son, c 1660-1665.

More RES

Adding to the various Wood Group Renewable Energy Services attractions, two new ads are currently appearing in magazines worldwide, like Renewable Energy Focus and North American Windpower.

Prism Design and I did concepts, copy and production; specific credit goes to Stacy Allen for excellent work. Each of the two ads addresses a different set of Wood Group features, advantages and benefits for the windpower industry – that “All together now” headline is particularly fun.

The strong Wood Group Gas Turbine Services brand we created two years ago is still clearly transmitted by KEEP ON TURNING.

Having way better photos to work with, as I noted below, made a lot of difference: The wind biz uses too many stock shots because fresh photography is so hard to come by. Again, thanks to client Chris Whitley and the RES team for the excellent photography, the opportunity and the support.

RES Energizing

Last year, when Texas wind farms generated 6,700 megawatts, the American Wind Energy Association’s WINDPOWER 2008 was in Houston. Hurricane Ike’s effects didn’t count.

This year Texas is topping out at 7,907 megawatts from more than 40 different projects. And WINDPOWER 2009 was held in Chicago, in McCormick Place – a big venue for a now even bigger event. Naturally, Wood Group Renewable Energy Services went to Chicago too. (BTW, no other state comes anywhere close to Texas. Y’all. And WINDPOWER 2010 comes back to Dallas.) Client Chris Whitley and his team lined up a significant package of wind power-related services and programs, major advances over 2008. These formed the foundation of new materials that we – Signalwrite Marketing and Prism Design – created for the business unit: Print advertising, cut sheets, new booth graphics. Thanks very much indeed.

I’ll show you the ads in a day to two but I wanted to get these fresh photos in front of you pretty quick. Last year (here), RES used a different exhibition property. This year, the RES team pulled out all the stops, adapting the more imposing Wood Group Gas Turbine Services booth with new copy and new photographs.

More than anything else (graphically), having fresh corporate photography to work with makes a huge difference in the presentation: Look at the wind-related images from Wood Group’s wind power projects around the world. The client supplied the new images.

Whitley says: In all honesty this was my first time leading such a project for such a large show (over 22,000 in attendance – the largest wind power show in North America) and I couldn’t have been happier with the results. We chose to use a graphic that depicted the installation of an offshore wind turbine as a backdrop to where the booth personnel would greet passers-by. You could literally see people stop in their tracks, turn to us and ask to be told more. I loved watching the effect that a single picture had on so many people – it was amazing.

The RES team also put in the extra time and effort needed to work the floor of McCormick Place last week – no wonder they needed more energy.

This year, the US can now claim the world’s largest wind energy capacity (25,170 MW), taking the lead from Germany, with 23,903 MW at the end of 2008. The nation’s fast growth has smashed all the previous records: Installed wind capacity in America grew by 50%. So have the opportunities for RES. I appreciate Chris Whitley letting us continue our involvement in wind energy…thanks to Wood Group here and abroad for the work.

Webb Revisions

It’s really too much fun: The graphic designer at Zephyr Salvo who created my revamped Signalwrite website is Michelle Webb. Here’s a shout-out to her, as well as John Philippe and Brian Bearden (prime mover), with my thanks. This new-fangled site came from a lengthy process which involved virtually no work on my part but some solid re-engineering on Zephyr Salvo’s.

Those of you who are intimately familiar with my old website, created by Paul Leigh, will find the content similar. But the key elements have been redesigned by Bearden and Webb to promote better searchability. At the same time, there’s a new way of looking at my samples which I really like and I hope you do, too: Please stop by for a visit.

Yes: my semaphore guys are still on-site. So is the yellow color, which I’m thinking of trademarking (somehow) – although I like what Michelle did with the subtle patterning at the top. And the familiar smiling face of yours truly – that’s still your basic awkward presence.

Thanks again to the Zephyr Salvo team and everyone else who’s kept the signals flying these past four years. All the best for a great weekend!