Reduce the Redundancies and Reduce the Work

For a while I was really doing a lot of work on certain things but was not really going anywhere. It's like my tires were spinning and I wasn't getting any traction. Maybe you've been there yourself and maybe you are there now.

Something thing that I have noticed that would be a contributing factor to that would be the various redundancies you may have in your day to day operations. perhaps you have been trying to expand but in reality, you just spread yourself too thin to be effective in any of the areas you are attempting to branch out in.

I had a number of websites and some got a lot of traffic while others not so much. it got to the point where updating the poor performing ones was just entirely too much work and simply not worth the effort anymore. So I decided to take the content from the poor performing sites and migrate it over to the better performing ones and give the poor performing ones the ax.

Now, since I no longer have to worry about those sites anymore, I can allow the domain names to expire. I have decided to allow about ten domain names to expire. So it should save me a substantial amount of money each year by not having to renew them.  But the biggest plus is that it just makes it so much easier to maintain my websites.

I also have a number of blogs that I will stop doing as well. I will continue this one though, so don't worry, if you are worried, that is. it's just that some of my blogs had similar themes and there was just no realy point in tryint to come up with new blog posts for all of these different blogs. that meant that they weren't being updated as often as they probably should be and the one thing that is important about having a blog is that you post regularly. Otherwise people lose interest.

So with the combination of reducing the number of websites I maintain and reducing the number of blogs I post to, it really simplifies things significantly. it's really about reducing the redundancies in order to free up time so that the time I have can be spent more productively.

The process of consolidating things is still going on but I am confident that once it has all been completed, things will be much easier for me to maintain. It should also be a lot less time consuming as well. believe me, I can always find something to do with the freed up time. make no mistake about that.

So where are your redundancies? Are there ways for you to consolidate things? give it some thought and maybe you will discover the things you should probably eliminate or scale back on. Give it a try and see if it works for you like it is for me.

Bob Craypoe, also known as R. L. Crepeau

Using Social Networking Sites for Visual Online Promotion

We have all heard that using social networking websites for the purposes of online marketing and increasing brand awareness can be an effective tool in promoting yourself online. But what would make it even more effective is visually oriented usage of the social networking websites.

I have found that a tweet send out from my Twitter account that contains an image is much more effective than just a text tweet. so What I will often do is include an image with a link to whatever it is I am attempting to promote.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are living in a visually oriented society. It's like that old song that says that video killed the radio star. There is a lot of truth to that statement. many musical acts that did not participate in music videos for the purpose of promoting their music ended up suffering for it as a result. While those who made great use of the visual medium often did very well.

The same could be said in regard to advertising and marketing and in reference to the use of social networking sites for the purpose of online marketing. this is where a site like Pinterest can come in handy. Pinterest, after all, is all about images. and what is great about it is if someone repins one of your Pnterest pins, they are basically advertising what you are promoting. Any image that you pin from your website has the potential to be repinned by someone else and if someone clicks on it, They go to the page that the image originated from. that's like having free banner ads placed all over the Internet. If you are fortunate enough to have some of your pins get a high ranking on Pinterest, it could be a goldmine in free online promotion.

Even if you are a blog writer, you are much more likely to draw someone's attention if your blog includes an image. Especially if you post the link on your Facebook or Goggle + page. It would be much more eye-catching if there is an image included with the post.

If possible, animated gifs work very well for catching someone's eye. unfortunately, they don't always work on certain social networking websites. But on the ones where they do, they are very effective in grabbing a person's attention.

So, to sum it up: I have seen the difference in performance in online promotion and marketing when you include images as opposed to when you don't. the performance or response rate is much better when you include an image. just something for you to think about.

Bob Craypoe, also known as R. L. Crepeau