Concrete Forest

New web site for Industrial Environmental Contracting Inc at http://www.iec-nj.com. Since their inception in 1994 they’ve completed over 1,200 cleanup projects ranging in size from small heating oil tank removals to multi-million dollar industrial remediation projects.

This client was a referral we received from one of our fellow members (Safe Haven Computers) here in the ‘Clients Plus BNI‘ group. If you need some computer or network work taking care of we wholeheartedly recommend Safe Haven!

E2E (Entrepreneurs Helping Entrepreneurs) held its second panel discussion event at the Royce Brook Golf Club in Hillsborough NJ on January 21st, 2010.

The event kicked off with open networking and refreshments before the panel sat down at about 7pm. Several experts shared their insights on tax and healthcare issues that small to medium sized businesses should be aware of and some guidance on ways to approach the topics to get the best results. Two of our own E2E group members also participated in the panel (Frank Senkewicz of Safe Haven Computers, and Hal Frankel of Ad Cetera Inc) to bring the perspective of business owners to the conversation and to share their experiences and lessons learned.

Our expert panel members were Leo Tropeano, CPA, MBA of Tropeano & McGrady, PC, and Paul Cella of Keyarx Capital Advisors. The event was facilitated by Lorette Pruden, owner of Team Nimbus NJ.

Based upon our continuing success with these events a third event will be scheduled in the Spring.

Check out our group’s web site at http://www.e2enj.com for updates.

E2E is a collaborative group of local Somerset County, NJ business owners working together to help other aspiring entrepreneurs to succeed. Blue Larch is a proud member and sponsor to this group.

Building on what we did for mugstate.com we’ve built teeshirtstate.com.

Both sites use Zazzle stores and are customized subsets filtering the Zazzle RSS feed to populate the sites.

Additionally we’ve created an index to allow the visitor to drill down into the products by state, and in some cases by city.

One of the things we did to try to help with SEO was incorporate the drill-down product selection information into the title and the keywords of the page.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do is improve search engine placement for my own sites through some search engine optimization (SEO).  I wanted to experiment on myself to see if I could get my own business more highly ranked in Google for a few web designer  / web developer search phrases.  One of the things I did was register a few domains that had portions of the search phrases I was targeting in them.  Then I built web pages at those domains featuring the same phrases while describing my services using the phrases as keywords and title tags. Then I built links from those domains to my main site (to try to inherit any value I might be creating).

And I did a couple of other little things that I’ve decided not to tell you about

On a weekly basis I run a series of batch reports to analyze where I am in Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.

I managed to crack Microsoft fairly quickly and get some good results, I even had two of the top three with different domains on one search phrase for a while….. but success at Google eluded me (and I didn’t really care all that much about Yahoo – sorry Yahoo).

Today I checked my batch reports and found I actually was #1 on Google for the search phrase “Web Developer NJ”,  which I thought was a decent search phrase for me to score well with.

Maybe next week I’ll plummet to #100 for no apparent reason, but for now I’m celebrating my success.

Design concept (3 of 4)

Just launched a new site for O’Neill Bookkeeping Services, LLC – http://www.obsnj.com

Took a little while to get this fairly simple site live due to some FTP access problems. The client didn’t have the information readily available and it took longer to get it live than it took to build.  Not the first time I’ve encountered these types of issues.

This was a very simple and inexpensive web site. Not much content and no functionality. Just plain HTML with stylesheets and a few simple graphics. The client wanted something very straightforward and in keeping with their profession.

One of the things we decided to do last year was to get involved in a networking group.  A consultant we know up in Cape Cod was a BNI member and he seemed to be getting a lot of business out of it….. so mid-year last year we decided to join the one here in Hillsborough.

Now I find myself the Vice President for the next few months, which seems to be a lot more work than was originally expected!

Times are hard in some places (though we are pretty busy still) and many small businesses really should be looking for ways to extend their virtual sales force through good networking.  I can heartily recommend BNI as a way of doing this.  I’ve gotten numerous referrals since I joined. Not all of them work out, but a pretty good percentage do because they are ‘qualified’ referrals…. you aren’t cold calling!

So checkout BNI in your area and go be a visitor (you can go to two meetings as a visitor with no commitment).

See our group’s website (yes Blue Larch built it) here at http://www.clientsplusbni.com

A great way to drive business is to keep your company in your customer’s thoughts by keeping in touch with them on a regular basis.

One of the ideal ways to do this is to send regular emails with updates about your services, or some items of specific interest to them.  They key is that these emails MUST be value to them or they’ll consign you to junk mail status pretty quickly, or never subscribe in the first place.

If you think you can maintain a regular (weekly or monthly) stream of useful content about what’s going on in your industry, your town, your country, your business, special offers…. then consider setting up an account with the premiere email newsletter service “Constant Contact”.

Constant Contact take all the complexity out of managing your mailing lists for you. They offer comprehensive tools and templates to get you sending out professional looking email newsletters faster than you’d think possible. They provide widgets to let folks subscribe directly on your website, and even unsubscribe through the constant contact site easily.  You never want to lose subscribers, but you also don’t want to annoy people by making it too hard.

You can also manage multiple newsletters and have your subscribers choose which they want.  What could be better?

So try them out today – constant contact