A new website for a retired school teacher looks attractive and contains an innovative way to draw visitors.

The website at www.RobertKellyTutor.com contains a widget that carries Kelly’s blog entries on Facebook. When Kelly adds a post on his Facebook page, it automatically is entered on his website blog. Saves time, don’t you think?

The website was created by this website’s parent company, TreeFrogClick (TFC), to attract students interested in advancing their language arts skills. “We now see the need for a solid social media presence,” said Kevin Banet, TFC president. “That’s why we either encourage our clients to post regularly, or offer a package to update their blogs for them.”

If you would like a personal website like this made, in addition to social media services like Facebook, please go to TreeFrogClick, or call Kevin Banet at 708-393-4098.

I’m a social media guy, and even I am impressed at the way Facebook can bring in visitors to a website. Our newest rollout, Great Catholic Homilies, was launched in April, and we’ve climbed up to around 500 visits each month so far. At the last check, 13% of the visits were coming from our Facebook page called Great Catholic Homilies. And we have fewer than 10 friends there.

One thing I do is post on my Facebook page about once a week, when I upload the latest homily on Great Catholic Homilies. I make an interesting comment about the homily and of course put the link there. I have also set up a widget for the Facebook page which is inserted into a page on Great Catholic Homilies called — well, what else — Blog. Each posting on Facebook automatically goes into the Blog page. It’s bringing ‘em in. Nifty, eh?

Here’s the old way of training office workers on the phone:

“See the ‘Edit’ button at the top of your screen?”

“I don’t see anything like that. What software am I supposed to be in?”

“Microsoft Word. What is on your screen?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you turn your computer on?”

“I thought it was on. Where’s the switch?”

Believe me, it is a case of the blind leading the blind. I’ve been frustrated, and I know my clients, miles away, have been too. (Of course, they’re not as ignorant as in the above example, however.)

The new training method,  on the other hand, is to direct people to YouTube, which has amassed thousands of how-to videos, many of them made by amateur videographers who get the message across by showing you how it’s done right on the screen. These geeks may sniff now and then if they have a cold, but they get to the point without a lot of big-company blah-blah.

For example, if you want to know how to add images to your WordPress-built website (which we here at TreeFrogClick use), just learn from Asha at the YouTube channel SocialMediaNinjas. He is probably from India, but his English is good enough. He uses a screen-capturing software, maybe Camtasia, to show you just where he is on the screen and what to do. In a few minutes, you can often find what you need.

Some videos are slick with music and fancy graphics, made by tutorial companies, and these are good, too. What is interesting is that the common man’s videos are usually just as good as those with the fancy wrappings. In any case, you can learn how to use all kinds of software. Just go to YouTube, type in “How to Use Microsoft Word,” and you’ll see 1,700 listings.

In the upcoming redesign of our TreeFrogClick website, we are including the below sample videos to help our clients learn the software the easy way.

WordPress Tutorials

WordPress updates its versions from time to time, so your admin page layout might look a little different than what you see on these videos. You will still be able to figure things out once you see them.

How to Edit a Page in WordPress, by ExcelNetMedia. Good simple intro. 1:45 min.

How to Add Images To Your WordPress Blog, by Asha

Tour of WordPress, by ExcelNetMedia. Overview

Google Apps - In the “Cloud”

Google Apps is a great file, calendar and website sharing program that works like an intranet, with password protection.

Google Apps Quick Tour, by Google. How you can share live documents on Google’s server among many collaborators in different locations. 1:58 min.

How to Use Google Calendar, by Bohemicus.

Using Google Apps Sites for Small Businesses, by AVL Marketing. Google’s internal website feature. 10:02 min.

Other Software

Microsoft Outlook 2007 - Setting Up Email Accounts by My Digital Works. 2:59 min.

It pays to be patient.

Muscular and determined, swift-legged skaters speed around the track at the Olympics being held now, but most of their hard work came in the months and years before this big event. It’s the same way with getting a high ranking in the search engines.

Website visits quadrupled with TFC SearchRank

As a business person, you are up against a lot of competition. What can you do? There are two basic ways to get a high ranking in the “natural” search results (as opposed to pay-per-click listings) in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines.

1. Post Many Pages

Google, which has around 70% of the search market, is like a hungry bear in the springtime. It looks for the best fish in the stream, and those are the ones that are swimming the fastest. In the same way, the websites that are producing pages using keywords that are relevant to, let’s say a bicycle shop, such as “bikes,” “parts,” “seats,” “cross-country,” or whatever, will get a high ranking.

Therefore, post many many pages describing your business service or product, on a regular basis. A great way for most businesses to do this is to build your website with a program called WordPress, which allows for the easy posting of many pages in a blog format. WordPress also allows you to change your web pages from any computer, with the use of a password.

2. Get Incoming Links

The other way to raise your rank is to have many incoming links from other websites to yours. These other websites should be relevant to yours, and you will fare better if they themselves are popular websites. Thus, a bicycle shop that has an incoming link from the League of American Bicyclists, which itself has a high ranking, would be very good. If you have good contacts among your associates, make use of them and ask them for a link to your site.

Another way to get incoming traffic is to post press releases on any of the free press release sites. The best is probably www.PRLog.com. While search engines won’t use these to boost your rank, the press release websites themselves have higher rankings than your website, and readers will find out about you through the articles.

Search Engine Optimization Takes Time

All in all, it takes time to build up your ranking in the search engines. It’s called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and such services will tell you that it takes at the minimum three months to see any bump in incoming visits, six months to see more, and a full year before the method really kicks in. You can track the number of web visits, and where they come from, with the use of Google Analytics, which is free.

It is probably true that the businesses and non-profits that would benefit most from SEO are those that need a high number of clients or customers, and have much turnover traffic, rather than those who rely on a low number.

WomanCare Services in the Chicago area has seen its web visits increase from nine per day to more than 35 per day in a two-year period. (See graph above.) This success is due to our SearchRank program, of TreeFrogClick, Inc. in the Chicago area. For more information, call Kevin Banet at 708-393-4098.

Phil Dailey was unemployed and thought he would try out a new video service to better explain his skills to prospective employers. He figured he would simply show up at the studio and talk about himself for a while. He was surprised to find that the company he used, ProVideoJobSeeker, worked with him to write a compelling script and coached him in his on-camera presentation skills.

Doing business in heavily unemployed Michigan, ProVideoJobSeeker.com certainly has many nearby potential customers. And this Detroit-area company provides a unique service in its one-minute videos for those seeking employment. It’s more than just a “talking head.” Shown behind the job seeker can be seen photos, graphics and even an image of the person’s resume. The overall effect is an attractive and professional-looking presentation.

“Only a few years ago, the cost would have been several thousand dollars. Now, you can have Super Bowl quality at a fraction of the investment,” says Dick Bradley, company owner. The company’s “e’mercial” is produced for $285. The video can be linked from one’s email or website, or displayed on Vimeo.com, which, although not as popular as YouTube, reaches a more professional audience. The video can also be embedded on one’s personal website or posted on social media sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

“We feel that the purpose of an ‘E’mercial is to showcase the ‘Real You,’” says Bradley. “And the best way to do that is for you appear in your own ‘E’mercial.”

Not too long ago, one of our clients got a phone call from a Channel 2 news reporter in Chicago. The reporter wanted some information about Natural Family Planning, and our client was the local chapter of the Couple to Couple League, which teaches the method.

The reporter was asking whether our client had seen a recent Time magazine article on Natural Family Planning. Local media often look to the big guys such as Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post for news ideas, and this reporter probably found our client by simply typing “Natural Family Planning Chicago” into a search engine. You can try this and you will find our client’s site, www.naturalfamilyplanningchicago.com, coming up first in the rankings.

That was good news for us at TreeFrogClick. We built the site in September 2008, and then began our SearchRank program for them the following March. With this program, we research and write three original articles about Natural Family Planning, birth control, and related subjects per month. As you can see in the graph above, the website visits have gradually increased. We also post the same article on our network of press release sites. (See the PDF info sheet of the graph above on our TreeFrogClick website.)

In addition to this, our client is now linked from the popular sexuality website, RHRealityCheck. While this website, which promotes birth control and abortion, is the polar opposite in ideology from the Natural Family Planning site, they consider our client an authority on the subject. And incoming links from authoritative websites on the same subject give a kick in search engine rankings.

It’s this kind of help that will make your website rank high in search engines and deliver more visits.

A popular new year’s resolution is not to make the same mistakes as we did in the past. Here are three blunders made by businesses and non-profits in our experience that will show you what not to do.

1. Can’t find Google

A man who is not too familiar with the ways of the web called us asking how people who did not know about his non-profit could find his website. When told to look on the website Google, he got to the website and asked, “It’s not here. All I see is this blank space and the words, ‘I’m feeling lucky.’ ”

2. Website — adios

A business owner in the Chicago area lost his website when a former employee, who built the site, refused to give the business access to the website. The former employee had registered the domain name in his own name rather than the company’s.

“Why don’t you prosecute him?” we asked the business owner.

“He went back to Mexico and we can’t reach him,” was the answer.

3. Missed the big time

Years ago a friend of mine asked me for a $300 loan to start up a computer company. “I’ll give you returns on your investment if the company takes off,” he pleaded. “I’m thinking of naming it something unique, like ‘Microsoft.’” I turned him down and the rest is history.

Well, OK, the last story is completely made up, but I got you to chuckle, didn’t I?

A Businessman’s View of the First Christmas

Anyone in business tends to look at historical events with a business eye. Since this is Christmas, I’d like to add my views on what may have happened in the events that led up to the birth of Christ. And since theologians nowadays seem to speculate all over the place about the events of the life of Christ, I will use some literary license.

The Gospel of Luke tells us that Mary traveled to the hill country of Judah to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who was six months pregnant. Since the distance from Nazareth to Judah was about 120 miles in those days, due to winding mountain roads, Joseph most likely traveled with her. A man can walk 20 miles in a day, so now we’re talking two weeks minimum round-trip travel time. Enough for a life-changing experience.

Joseph was called a carpenter, but at the beginning of his career may have worked only in stone, a more primitive working material. Coming from the small town of Nazareth, he was perhaps unaware of a technological revolution taking place in construction methods. Woodworking, especially using geometric measurements, was a new development from the Greeks, the high technology of the day. It could be that Joseph, in meeting and networking with others along the journey to Judah, was exposed to this new technology. He likely saw the uses of geometric wood cuts in animal-drawn carts and fine homes.

Expanding His Knowledge Base

I can just see this foster-father of Jesus saying, “Look, Mary, we can take this woodworking back to Nazareth and my customers will love it!” If this is the route he took, Joseph would have to expand his knowledge base to learn more math to accommodate angles and the rudimentary form of trigonometry of its day to make his wood cuts. Many months after their trip to Judah, Joseph could have taken the gold from one of the three wise men who visited Christ and invested it in new saws, hammers, nails and various types of wood. (Since the gold was a gift and not earned income, it would have escaped the hands of the tax collectors.)

It could be that Joseph hired other tradesmen and expanded his business. But people being who they are, his workers may have demanded higher wages and better working conditions. Since not one word of Joseph’s was recorded in the Bible, we can speculate that Joseph was not a good communicator, and could not solve his company problems. Maybe the stress of his new business led to heart failure, and that is why he died before Jesus was 30, as tradition says.

Yet, the Bible says that Joseph was a “just man,” and we can assume that he died with a clear conscience, and that is why he is the patron saint of the dying.

All this from a journey to Judah to visit a relative.

Take an Ad for “Here I Am Lord” Youth Conference, St. Charles IL

Now is the time for Catholic religious communities to reach youth with a message about their communities. Three thousand young persons will be coming to the Here I Am Lord (HIAL) vocations conference in St. Charles, IL, March 4 - 7, 2010.

You can take out an attractive ad, such as the one shown at left, on the HIAL website at www.HereIAmLord.net. Your ad will be seen by youth, parents, and young adult ministry organizers who come to learn and sign up for the conference. This is your target audience.

Last year the HIAL website enjoyed 1,793 visits between December and March, which is nearly 450 visits per month and more than 100 visits per week. This year, some 3,000 teens and young adults will participate in the conference. Furthermore, your ad will cost the same as last year - and the cost of $175 for December through March 31 has been reduced to $150 if you contact Kevin Banet at Kevin@treefrogclick.com. We can also design an attractive ad for you like the ones shown on this page for only $60.

Limited Number of Ads

Our company, TreeFrogClick, works closely with conference organizers each year, and your ad will be attractively displayed on the www.HereIAmLord.net home page. Ads are placed from top down, on a first-come, first-served basis. In order to maximize visibility, we allow only 12 ads on this website. As of today, the ad space is mostly filled up, so it’s important to act now to get good placement, high up on the page.

Read more about it at TreeFrogClick-HIAL. Our ad is only one-seventh the cost of a major Catholic online publisher. And our ads are targeted. We can bill you. Simply email Kevin J. Banet, or call 708-393-4098 to ensure your ad will be placed. Time is limited - remember, only 12 ads will be allowed. Call or email us today.

Sure, there’s lots to be thankful for this Thanksgiving week. But don’t get mashed like a sweet potato when putting up a website. Here are five guidelines to follow to avoid getting roasted in your next internet advertising venture.

What basics do you look for in finding a company to design a new website? Over the years, we at TreeFrogClick have made some crucial realizations. Here are five top qualities of a good website design firm.

A Good Website Firm

1. Good communication. Will the firm be responsive to you and return phone calls and emails? Or are they too big to be concerned with you? Will you be talking with offshore developers who have an accent and are difficult to get ahold of?
2. Appealing portfolio. Are the websites designed by the firm attractive? Do they have link navigation that is intuitive? Can you find all pages easily? Are the websites designed to be easily indexed by search engines? For searches, important words and links should be done in text rather than graphics.
3. Ease of use. Will you have the ability to make basic text and picture changes on your website from any computer with the use of a password? Or will you have to pay a high hourly fee to do so? What is their minimum hourly charge? $75 is a lot to pay to change a phone number.
4. Access to website. Will you have full administrative server rights to your website? Will you be given the passwords for FTP and the website itself? Will you have the ability to completely change your website, or is that right reserved by the design company?
5. Honesty and integrity. Will the domain be registered in your and your company’s name, and will you be able to verify this? Does the firm’s contract ensure this? Will you be paying unnecessary ongoing administrative fees after the website is built? Is a contract provided? Can you understand it?

Read testimonies of the firm’s happy clients and ask questions about the above points.

If you think you have it rough, remember that the pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621, after nearly half their members died in their first New England winter. Count your blessings and have a great celebration.

Read our free PDF fact sheet, “Seven Proven Ways to Drive Visitors to Your Website.”