Creative meets Innovative
And the winner is…
1 Nov 2010 | No Comments | posted by Coldfire Promotions | in Blog Post, Miscellaneous, Slider
Congratulations to Fred and Debbie Kressbach of Immanuel Lutheran School on winning the Dinner and a Movie Drawing at our Grand Opening last week!
Also, thank you to everyone who was able to make it as well as those who sent your regards via Facebook, LinkedIn, e-mail, and especially the cards in the mail! We really appreciate all of your support! Needless to say, the Grand Opening was a great success. You can check out a few of our photos from the event via our Facebook page here. Thanks again to everyone!
The 7 Most Essential WordPress Plugins For Your Web Site
28 Oct 2010 | No Comments | posted by Coldfire Promotions | in Blog Post, Miscellaneous
One of the great advantages of creating a WordPress web site versus coding your own, or even using a template, is that everything is so much more automated. While you still have the option to customize your own HTML, JavaScript, and even Flash tools within your website, the utility of WordPress provides so much more. One such tool is the availability of what they call “plugins.” According to Word Press, at the very moment of this blog post, there are 11,811 plugins that account for 125,383,955 downloads! Insane! You can see for yourself by clicking here.
So what good are plugins anyhow?
According to WordPress, “Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine.” Although that’s a pretty plain and simple statement, it’s quite realistic. As you’ll see below, plugins can delete spammy, automated comments, create meta tags for you, provide you with web traffic analytics, and much, much more. Below is my list of 8 Essential WordPress Plugins every webmaster should utilize in their site (in no particular order):
1) Google XML Sitemaps – This is one of the many necessary tools for providing your site with solid Search Engine Optimization (SEO). According to Google, “Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover.” But why would you need this? Basically, a XML Sitemap is a simple list of all of the pages on your site. By creating this document, and submitting it to search engines like Google, ensures you what your content will be discovered by the search engines. Not just some of it, but all of it. The reason I suggest utilizing this plugin is because it automates and updates the Sitemap for you. And until you have tried to keep a Sitemap updated yourself, you won’t know how much of a time saver this really is. I tried keeping up with the Sitemaps on my previous sites and all I got was a headache!
2) Redirection – While this plugin may not be absolutely necessary for eveyone, it definitely is if you’re moving, changing, or updating your web site like we so frequently do. Remember the page http://coldfirepromotions.com/webdesign from our old site? It used to link you to all the information on our web design services. Well, with the new structure of our site the page was changed to http://coldfirepromotions.com/services/web-marketing/web-site-design. However, by using this plugin we can automatically redirect our customers to the new page, even if they click a link to the old page or type in the address themselves. Go ahead, give it a click!
3) Google Analytics for WordPress – If you don’t already have Google Analytics running on your site (or some other kind of awesome web traffic tool), “you’re doing it wrong,” as they say. While a web site is a great selling tool, it’s an even better marketing tool. And what is the value of marketing if you’re not doing any research or analytics along with it? I’ll tell you… ZIP! ZILCH! NOTTA! You may want to read more about web site design and it’s value. Anyways, this plugin basically just automatically inserts your Google Analytics code into your HTML for you. It’s handy if you don’t understand web coding, don’t understand Google’s crazy instructions, or are just lazy.
4) Contact Form 7 – This is one of the most common WordPress plugins, and also one of the most important. While almost everyone has a “contact page” on their website, not enough utilize a contact form. Contact Form 7 makes this possible by providing you with an easy step-by-step guide to create your own form. I would also suggest checking out Fast Secure Contact Form. It’s just as good as Contact Form 7 and actually has more options. However, for whatever reason, it isn’t quite as popular.
5) All In One SEO Pack – While you may not know how to code your own website, you probably don’t have the proper marketing expertise, and you more than likely don’t have the resources to hire a SEO Specialist, there are other options! This WordPress plugin is quite essential for everyone. Although it won’t be as high of quality as someone who can come in and get to know your business, it’s not bad for an out-of-the-box SEO pack! It will write your titles for you, create descriptions and keywords, and perform all of the necessary meta tagging. While it may not rank you first in Google, it will definitely help make your web site or blog more discoverable.
6) Askimet – I wasn’t too sure about this one myself until I started getting all sorts of weird, spammy comments. One our post about the 2011 K/E Promotion Calendar received a comment about buying “prom supplies.” I mean, seriously? Promotional =/= prom. Ig you’re going to use a bot to spam blogs at least us a “smart” one! In any case, this plugin checks the comments, URL’s and their authors against a database and does a pretty good job at keeping out the spammers! You probably don’t need it if your blog or web site doesn’t get a ton of traffic, but it will likely come in handy one day.
7) WordPress Related Posts – You have an archive, you have a menu for your most recent posts, but do you have a spot for related posts? This is one of those “hidden” tools that can really increase your Search Engine Optimization by creating “link building.” This will posts links to similar stories on ever blog post you create. Not only does this help your visibility to the search engines, but it will most likely cause your users to become more engaged, stick around on your site longer, and read more of your articles.
There you have it. Coldfire Promotions’ list of the 7 Most Essential WordPress Plugins for your Blog or Web Site. Can you think of some more? Something we forgot to mention here? Comment below! And don’t forget to share this story on Facbeook, Twitter and e-mail via the buttons below. Thanks!
You’re Invited to our Grand Opening!
26 Oct 2010 | No Comments | posted by Coldfire Promotions | in Blog Post, Miscellaneous
GRAND OPENING!
Please join us for the grand opening of
COLDFIRE PROMOTIONS
Friday, October 29, 2010
Open House: 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Coldfire Promotions’ NEW Office
14142 Lakeside Blvd. North, Suite A
Shelby Township, MI 48315
Cider and Donuts will be served
Ribbon cutting at 4:00 pm
Bring a business card to enter in our Dinner and a Movie Drawing!
Creative meets Literacy! Support Our Cause!
21 Oct 2010 | No Comments | posted by Coldfire Promotions | in Blog Post, Miscellaneous, Projects
We’ve been hard at work creating a book designed to help inspire the creative genius residing in the imaginations of young children. This book prompts creativity and literacy by requiring the children to partially generate stories and then illustrate what they created. This, in effect, helps the children to learn the basic parts of speech, how they interact, and how drastically a story can be altered by simply modifying a few nouns, verbs, and adjectives. At the same time, it asks the children to illustrate the story that they created, the idea being to give them a small idea to get them started and hopefully provoke a flood of creativity. This concept has led us to adopt the following metaphor as a slogan to promote the basic premise of the book:
“A roaring fire of imagination only needs a little spark to ignite it. Help spark a child’s imagination!”
Since the initial goal was to promote creativity and imaginative ideas, we have announced that we intend to donate several hundred of these books to local educational institutions, with a target age group of 3rd to 5th grade children. We hope to print large volumes of this book; however, the printing volume will be directly determined by the revenue generated from both donations and the sale of the fundraising/promotional bookmarks. Once enough bookmarks have sold, the book will be put into production. Of course, some of the books will be for sale as well, available while supplies last.
It is our hope that by releasing this book, it will help to counter the growing trend of squelching creativity in children, and instead let their imaginations flourish. You can support our cause simply by purchasing a $2.00 bookmark, or by clicking the donate button, both of which can be done below or via the Coldfire Promotions web-store. A roaring fire of imagination only needs a little spark to ignite it. Help spark a child’s imagination and buy a bookmark.
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Yea, it’s true… We got a 70%+ CTR. Twice.
17 Oct 2010 | No Comments | posted by Coldfire Promotions | in Blog Post, Miscellaneous, Slider
As many of our regular readers have probably already seen, we recently created a short YouTube video for one of our clients in hopes that it would go viral. The premise of the video was to spoof the recent Chrysler/UAW-employee debacle that led to 13 employees getting fired. While this was a touchy subject, we decided to take a risk and publish the video anyway.
While the original broadcast was about the employees drinking beer and smoking pot on their lunch break, we took a humorous spin on it and showed how “K/E employees are so busy and such hard workers that they don’t have time for lunch breaks, they have to drink and smoke on the job!” While it’s quite obvious that the whole story is totally unrealistic, we did decide to place a disclaimer in the video just in case.
Now that you understand the reason behind it all, and you’ve watched the video, of course, let’s take a look at how we achieved those 70%+ click-through rates!
While the national CTR for e-blasts is only 5.9% (Epsilon Q4 2009 E-mail Trends and Benchmark, Jan 2010), our e-mail campaign announcing this YouTube video reached a record high CTR of OVER TWELVE TIMES THAT! First, we designed and delivered and e-blast for our client, K/E Electric Supply, announcing this “hilarious spoof video” in which K/E employees were “BUSTED drinking and smoking on the job.” After only hours of the e-blast being live, it achieved an open rate of 38.65% and a click-through rate of 76.70%! I could not believe it! While Coldfire Promotions is known for having high-end e-marketing statistical averages (23.84% CTR so far this year), this was undoubtedly insanely high!
As exciting as this was, I had to be sure. Using a similarly design e-blast, I went ahead and sent out one to my own e-mail list. Sure enough, 24 hours later, it turned out a 72.22% click-through rate! It wasn’t a fluke; it was just attention-grabbing marketing.
So what was the secret, you ask? It could have been the interesting subject line. It might have been the fun, uniquely-designed e-blast. Or it might have just been timing. However, I’m going to have to chalk this one up to YouTube’s embed feature. While it is currently impossible to embed video directly into e-mails (the coding doesn’t allow it, and can you imagine an e-mail that took 5 minutes to load?), there is a lovely thing called the “print screen” button! While preparing my recent white paper for the public, I read a claim that said placing and image into an e-mail that looks like an embedded YouTube video will draw 5 times as many clicks than a text link. Sure enough, I decided to try it (twice) and it definitely does work!
So what’s the moral of the story? Quit wasting your time with plain text e-mails, poor color choices, and lack of attention-grabbing imagery. Try something new, something fresh, and hit that 70% click-through rate! Don’t know how to? Give us a call, we’ll do it for you.
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