(Take a breath). Ok, let’s have some straight talk: the only thing that revolutionizes online marketing is when you select the right tool, integrate your efforts, and continually improve your use of the tool. Rather than an overview of all the available tools, I’ll show you here our favorites; those tools that work as intended, integrate easily, and are either free or reasonably priced.

Select the Right Tool

1. Website Content Management System: WordPress
   • WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites. This runaway success is due to two important factors: it was built for CMS users not web developers, and it began as a publishing platform. WordPress now powers everything from Mobile Apps to Ecommerce, but its still easy to use. That means our post-project relationship with the client is “how do we make this even better,” not “how do I use the d@#$ thing!”
   • As an Open Source platform, WordPress stands on the shoulders of a massive community of developers. I’ve owned a business too, and understand the fear that a contractor will box you into a platform that will be hard to leave or become obsoleted. WordPress provides the closest thing to “future-proofing” you are going to get in business.
   • WordPress has plugins for everything from social share buttons to photo galleries, which means that we often can build on the work of others, rather than starting from scratch.
2. Enewsletter – MailChimp, Campaign Monitor
   • Many of our clients still enjoy great success and high open rates with quality enewsletters. You’ll enjoy the process of creating those newsletter much more if you use the great tools from MailChimp and Campaign Monitor! They have attractive templates, great tutorials, and excellent analytics to track your success.
3. Social Media – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest
   • Remember: sniper rifle not shotgun!
   • Facebook lends itself to consumer products, daily deals, advocacy, and any organization where affinity and loyalty are key to the purchasing process.
   • Twitter and LinkedIn have proven themselves effective for PR, promotions, observing trends around your product or service, and immediate consumer feedback.
   • Pinterest allows companies to connect with passionate niche communities (fitness freaks, moms of toddlers, nature lovers) with unique content and top-shelf photography.
4. Analytics – Google Analytics
   • Google Analytics is free, and with the recent additions of features like custom reports it has become even more useful at creating actionable data

Integrate Your Efforts

Google Analytics is a great place to start. The content analysis shows you where visitors go, what makes them stay, and what makes them leave! Social reporting helps you build on what’s working, and fix or abandon what isn’t. As the video below shows, their multi-channel funnels show you how your marketing channels are working together to create sales and conversions.

Kaizen – Continual Improvement

The rise of Japanese manufacturing as the best in the world came from this concept of “Kaizen,” a philosophy of continuous improvement that was made in America but perfected in Japan. It’s the idea of eliminating waste by improving standardized activities and processes.

Google Analytics, MailChimp, and Campaign Monitor all provide powerful analytics…well, powerful if you use them! A simple spreadsheet or document can be used to track important information like

• What was my open rates on my newsletters, and what strategies did I try? (image vs no image; 2 articles vs 3 articles; adding testimonials, etc)
• What percentage of my conversions in Google Analytics come from search traffic, pay per click (Google Adwords), social media, or enewsletters? Do those results match the time I spend on them?
• Which blog articles got the most traction in search and social media? Can you guess why? Did that traffic result in more leads or sales?

A novel could be written about each of these, but to reiterate our original point: the only thing that revolutionizes online marketing is when you select the right tool, integrate your efforts, and continually improve your use of the tool. So get out there and get going!

Blue Riot Labs is a Denver Search Engine Optimization and Denver Web Marketing Company; SEO Denver.

• Designed a site that tied together products, applications and resources for an intuitive and informative user experience
• Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click: Cost Per Click down 23% while simultaneously raising Click Through Rate 1900% (nope, not a typo)
• Content management system that allows them to efficiently maintain their sizable product catalog and resources database
• 31 keywords in the top 30 of Google and rising
• Creating custom post types specific for their needs, along with “post-to-post” capabilities

What do you do when a collection of crazy-brilliant economic futurists need a website? Well, you add:

• 70ml of pure user interface
• 175ml of refined WordPress integration
• 45ml of videos, blog posts, and more

Then you pile the mixture into the BRL beaker, spin it at the speed of light, and you get: an uber-smart, geeky-cool site of smart people we are still trying to understand. It will come (we hope).

Check the site out, the latest web design and development creation from the BRL WordPress lab.

1. Do You Have The Skill?
Let’s face it, you can use Photoshop to create any site design conceivable, but if you’re not an artist, you’re not going to do very well. A professional website requires top-notch design work. But it also requires top-notch copywriting, coding and many other elements in order to be considered perfect.
If you want a website that looks, acts and does as it should, you likely need the help of web design experts. Just because you can design websites using many of today’s online tools, doesn’t mean that you’ll be good at it, or that you’ll produce quality work.

2. Do You Have the Time?
Even with all the free web design platforms and services out there, building a website takes a lot of time and effort. That’s time and effort that you are taking away from running your business. All business owners should learn to leave the professional web design services to the professionals. When you hire the right service, you have expert designers, writers, coders, marketers and everyone in between, all working for you and your business. That leaves your schedule open to run and organize yourbusiness, and to count your money of course.

3. Templates Are One-Size-Fits-All
Creating a business website is not unlike dressing up for a formal dinner party that is filled with people you’re trying to impress. Your suit/dress must be unique and it must fit you just right. After all, you’re going to be judged on how you look, how you act, what you say and how you say it.
Now imagine if you went to a dinner party with a one-size-fits all suit or dress. And imagine if you prepared for that dinner party with canned speeches that everyone’s already heard before. Trust me, it’s far better to be unique and to ‘dress to impress’ than to use templates that everyone else is using. In business, it’s all about first impressions. What first impression do you want to make?

4. Made-To-Order
A template is going to be loaded with graphics, copy and code that are used by dozens if not thousands of other businesses. A customized web design service offers the top-notch graphics, copy and code, but you also get custom web applications to go with your site. These apps include things like shopping carts, payment systems, and anything else your site needs to provide a functional and useful web browsing experience for your visitors, prospects and customers. A template or a DIY site won’t be as useful or as valuable as one that’s tailor made to fit your exact needs.

5. Worth the Investment
Sure, many templates and DIY web design platforms are free. But templates and halfway decent websites aren’t going to win you any favors in the business world. Not only will your website fail to impress anyone, but nobody will be able to find it.
A custom-built website created by a professional web design company is optimized for the search engines so that your target market is always within easy reach. And because most people are using their computers and smart phones to search for products and services these days, you’ll definitely want your website be optimized for the search engines. A template and a DIY website just won’t have the ‘search engine juice’ necessary to reach out to your audience.

And the best part is that the investment for custom web design services is only a one-time thing. There are no monthly fees, thanks to WordPress and other content management systems (CMS). Take our clients, for example. They pay for our custom web design services one time, they manage everything through WordPress and they’re then able to reap the benefits for years.
These five reasons should convince you that custom web design services are worth the investment. Sure, anyone can make a website these days. But if you want your website to be the best and you want your business/product or service to go viral, you need to hire the best. Sure, I’m biased, but I recommend Blue Riot Labs. With expert designers, writers, coders, marketers and everything else web marketing related, you can’t afford to go anywhere else.

So if you’re currently using templates and DIY platforms for your business web design needs, you may be holding your success at bay. Unleash your potential and let Blue Riot Labs unleash your business/product or service on the masses. Give us a chance to show you personally why custom web design services are the way to go if you want to get ahead.

It’s easy to see why WordPress is so popular. Even Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and parent company Automattic, said in a recent interview with Memeburn, “I think the reason WordPress has been successful…is because people have found themselves empowered to create beautiful blogs and websites without having to learn a lot of technology.”

And while Mullenweg must be ecstatic over the recent milestone, he wasn’t the first one to break the news. Mullenweg actually named The New Media and Adweek as the news sites that broke the news, saying, “As noted on TNW and Adweek, yesterday we passed over 50,000,000 websites, blogs, portfolios, stores, pet projects, and of course cat websites powered by WordPress.”
The Adweek piece that Mullenweg is referring to did indeed report the 50 million blogs milestone, but it also reported that WordPress powers 14% of websites worldwide. In fact, the Adweek article reports that WordPress users publish on average 500,000 posts per day. That amounts to more than 287 WordPress visitors and 2.5 billion page views per month!
But The Next Web, the other news publication that broke the story, took things a bit further. Consider these statistics that TNW came up with. The article states that WordPress has helped over 350,000 WordPress.com bloggers post over 302,000 posts and over 270,000 comments. Those are staggering numbers!

The site goes on to say that, roughly calculated, that means that 210 posts were made every minute, along with 188 comments. In fact, the TNW states that the WordPress stats page counts a total of nearly 77 million words written, which is almost double that of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s all in one day, mind you. It’s difficult to wrap your head around a statistic like that, but the crazy part is that the WordPress counter shows no signs of slowing. As more and more individuals, business owners, hobbyists and others discover WordPress, those statistics are only going to get exponentially bigger.

We applaud WordPress and can only hope that more users will jump on board with the CMS that literally anyone can use. And we’ll continue to do our part to spread the word. We continue to use WordPress for all of our client projects, from web design to web development, to app and plug-in development and more.

Great job, WordPress, Matt Mullenweg and the team at Automattic! We can’t wait to see the next update, which is supposed to integrate HTML5. According to Mullenweg himself in that same Memeburn interview when asked about the new update, “I can’t wait.” I think that says it all.
If the next version is anything like 3.2 or before, we can only expect great things.

Web Design Without WordPress
To help illustrate how great WordPress is at helping even the novice design fantastic and eye-catching websites, let’s look at the process of designing a site without the popular CMS. First, we’re going to need to learn HTML, or we can use a WSYIWYG editor like Dreamweaver or Frontpage. But even if you use a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor, we’re still going to have to know some HTML coding. For instance, if you want a side bar, you’re going to have to know how to create Div tags in order to separate those areas on your website. And if you want a web form on your website, or a photo gallery, you’re going to have to, again, create Div tags so that the visitor’s browser knows…

Let’s stop right there. This is already getting too complicated. Now let’s see how easy it is to create a professional looking website in minutes using WordPress.

WordPress Web Design
First, we need a theme. Thankfully, WordPress comes with a few themes already built in. Now we need a few widgets like the Twitter widget so that we can display our Tweets right on our homepage. Most of these widgets come with the ability to change colors and fonts quickly and easily so we know they are going to match our site design perfectly.
If you notice, most themes also come complete with sidebars, so we just need to add a calendar widget, maybe a photo gallery widget like the Flickr plug-in and we’re all set. Now we just need to add our content and our site is polished and ready for prime-time.

Of course, this has been a slight exaggeration. They do make themes for HTML sites, too. But you will still need HTML knowledge if you want to personalize that theme in any way. And then you have to think about things like web forms, shopping carts and membership login forms. The bottom line is that, if you’re not proficient in HTML, you’re going to have a very rough time creating a website that looks professional and demands authority.
On the other hand, if you can point and click, you can design a site that looks ten times as good in WordPress, and in less than half the time. If you don’t believe it, give it a try. Download WordPress (it’s completely free), play around with various themes, widgets and plug-ins and soon you’ll have a completely unique site that wows your prospects and frightens competitors.

Common Field Names
Most Denver WordPress Ecommerce sites use forms of some type, and those forms should be kept uniform so that customers recognize them right away. This includes using common names for your fields. This way, browser autofillers will always fill in the forms for the customer, making the shopping experience faster and more efficient. If you use uncommon names for fields, the browsers will certainly get the fields wrong and the customer will have to waste time fixing them.

Easy To Buy
Customers should be able to drop by your site and get what they want seamlessly and with very little effort. In other words, your products should be easy to buy. While registration is helpful to build a list of loyal customers, making registration mandatory for shoppers is annoying and can turn a lot of your prospects off. Instead, let your customers buy even without registering (of course, you’ll want to form incentives for signing in) and you’ll likely see a rise in your site’s conversion rates.

Two Clicks Away
If at all possible, make sure your products are never more than a couple clicks away. This means that your products should never be submerged under four pages of clickthroughs. Instead, implement a search function and make it easy for customers to get to your product in one or two clicks Maximum!

Details Optional
When it comes to your main products page, keep things minimal with the names and photos of your products only. Then, add a snippet of a description while allowing browsing customers to opt for longer descriptions if they wish. Or, you can make the description completely optional. A hover-over description or a completely different description page will keep your home page neat and organized and will make it a pleasant environment for every shopper.

Build Your Site For Shoppers
The WordPress Ecommerce sites developed by Blue Riot Labs are already optimized for the major search engines, but they are made for shoppers first. If your WordPress Ecommerce site is made for search engines first and shoppers second, you might lose some of the personal touch that helps to form a bond between you and your target audience. Using keywords on your main products page is fine, but include some personality and make your customers feel at home. Remember, the reason you’re optimizing for the search engines in the first place is to attract more human customers. Cater to those customers and you’ll enjoy much better results.

If you keep these tips in mind, your Denver WordPress Ecommerce site will see a drastic rise in traffic and sales. Of course, you can also call on Blue Riot Labs to create your WordPress Ecommerce site for you. With shoppers as the primary focus, and with search engine optimization not far behind, you’ll be more than satisfied with the results to your bottom line. Today’s consumer is incredibly Internet savvy and so the same old Ecommerce techniques no longer work. Hire a team that knows the nuances of the search engines and of WordPress Ecommerce and take your business to the next level.

What is the Roots Theme?
The Roots theme comes packed with additional features that won’t be found in other themes and plug-ins. This makes Roots fast and the theme comes with some of the cleanest code available. Plus, it’s made for hardened WordPress veterans and novices alike, which means all developers should find something they enjoy in Roots. But what sets the theme apart is the combination of other themes and frameworks that you may already be familiar with.

HTML 5 Boilerplate: This is a template for HTML 5 development that includes all the bells and whistles developers could ask for with complete cross-browser consistency.

Starkers: A ‘bare-bones’  WordPress theme that acts as a great starting point for new theme developers.
Blueprint CSS (960.gs): This framework provides a grid-based layout system that works on new and old browsers alike.

The result is a new and improved theme framework that provides all the bells and whistles you could ask for, with the simplicity and ease-of-use that, as a developer, you’ll absolutely love. And the theme is constantly being updated. It’s also completely customizable. Simply take out what you don’t want and go. It’s that easy.

Updated Often
The theme already has a growing collection of documentation and there are frequent updates to the code and manuals. The Roots theme also comes without that cookie-cutter feel that you get with some themes. With a variety of layouts and looks, you’ll be able to add your own creativity to your projects using this simple framework that allows you to build your own killer themes in a short period of time.

Once the Roots theme is installed, you’ll instantly receive:
A Home Page Complete with Filler Content
Changes to the Uploads Folder and Options
Auto-Created Menus with Set Locations

This makes it easy to get up and running right away, which makes Roots not only user-friendly but also incredibly convenient. Roots is also multilingual-ready and comes with a list of recommended plug-ins to that will maximize the theme’s customization and power.

So if you’ve been on the lookout for an ultra-modern WordPress theme framework, or you’re just ready to start using HTML 5 in your WordPress blogs and sites, Roots is the theme you’ll want to try next.

Ben has put a lot of work into Roots and he is constantly adding to it, and we are very happy to promote it. We highly recommend that you add Roots to your own websites and blogs. You can download your own version of Roots on GitHub, a social coding platform. To read and learn more, and for complete download instructions, visit the Roots Theme website at http://rootstheme.com/.

NextGen Gallery
According to most bloggers online, this image gallery plug-in is not only nice to look at but it’s simple to use. With NextGen, you can integrate a flash slideshow gallery right on your blog. With a simple administration system and the ability to handle multiple galleries at once, this is one plug-in that is a must-have for the blog-keeping shutterbug.

Fotobook
Why have the same photos on your blog and on Facebook? Why not merge the two? With this plug-in, you’ll be able to link your WordPress site and your Facebook profile so that you can share photos between the two. Displays photo albums from multiple Facebook accounts and you can even insert individual photos into posts and pages.

WordPress Gallery Plug-in
This plug-in was designed to help even the most technologically-challenged bloggers host mesmerizing photo galleries. With this plug-in, there is no need to manually resize images before you post them, as the plug-in allows you to resize the image to the dimension of your choice.

Inline Gallery
This plug ‘n play WordPress image gallery plug-in is superfast and easy to configure, allowing you to set up arbitrary image galleries that work as soon as the plug-in is installed. However, you should be aware that production for this plug-in has been shut down and thus there is no support. Users are even warned prior to using it on the WordPress plug-in directory page that the author has no time or plans of supporting the plug-in and that you, the user, are on your own. Still, if an arbitrary and easy-to-use slideshow is what you want, Inline isn’t half bad.

Gallery Plus
Gallery Plus allows you to use the built-in WordPress gallery’s many options without needing to know how to use shortcodes. Now you have many options for creating photo galleries on your page and you’ll extend the internal gallery’s functionality. What does that all mean? It means more customization, more ease-of-use, and it means your visitors now get to experience all of your images exactly as you deem fit.

These five WordPress image gallery plug-ins will help you share your photos and maximize your blog posts. This is 2011, after all. Putting images on your site shouldn’t be difficult and it shouldn’t take any time at all. That’s where these plug-ins come in. Choose one of the above WordPress gallery plug-ins, install it on your site or blog and show your new photos and albums to the world in a way that hypnotizes, mesmerizes and always has visitors coming back for more.

1. Establish Authority
Anyone can claim to be an expert, but few will be able to write consistently about a topic over a long period of time if they don’t have more than a rudimentary grasp of the subject matter at hand. If you can maintain a well-written blog for months or years, you’ll have no trouble establishing yourself as the go-to person in your field. Don’t just tell your target market that you’re an expert. Write about your subject and prove it to them.

2. Remain Relevant
Your competitors may have sites that they haven’t updated in months, or even years. Meanwhile, you’re plugging along, publishing blog entry after blog entry, providing your visitors with fresh and useful content that further builds your brand.

3. Keeps You Up-To-Date In Your Field
If you hope to provide regular, quality content for each of your blog’s visitors, then you’re going to be required to research your field every chance you get. Every blog post is a chance to unveil some new technology or breakthrough in your field. By providing useful content for your readers, you’ll remain on the up-and-up regarding your industry and your business will be stronger because of it.

4. Search Engines Love Them
The major search engines love fresh, relevant content and that’s exactly how you should operate your blog. If you write regular posts using relevant keywords, you’ll notice a nice boost in your site’s rankings.

5. Inexpensive Form of Self-Promotion
Blogging is not only a very effective way of reaching out to your audience, but it’s practically free. You can get started blogging right now with a free hosted account, or you can consult with Blue Riot Labs’ own Denver WordPress developers to create a blog for you. No matter how you slice it, blogging is an investment that can yield an enormous ROI.

Let’s face it, you can’t just hide behind a well-designed letterhead or logo anymore. These days you have to be social. You have to communicate with your target audience as a real person, not just some disembodied corporate figurehead. The days of Ronald McDonald and the red-headed Wendy’s girl representing those corporations are gone. These days, when someone finds a band-aid in their hamburger or a hair in their box of fries, we want to hear from the CEO himself. And what better way for that CEO to release a statement than to place that release on the company’s blog? Here at Blue Riot Labs we use WordPress for blogging and getting across great information to our clients and perspective clients.

If you’re not blogging, you should be. But now you may be wondering what to say. As a business owner, you must get into the heads of your prospects and customers. If you were one of your prospects and you wanted to engage your company, what sorts of questions would you ask? What information would you seek? That’s all you need. That’s your subject matter. Now you just need to study your field a little bit more, stay on top of current and rising trends, and make regular blog posts to give your human visitors and search engine spiders information that will maintain your relevance and authority in your field.
Plus, blogging lets you speak your mind. And who doesn’t want to do that?