One of the main reasons Canal Street Gallery needed a new website was not for aesthetic purposes, it was a functionality issue.  The problem lied in the fact that the gallery hosts frequent events, and it needs constant updates and up keeping.  Artists come and go, and so does their art work.  At the time, the website was built in a platform that only allowed someone with programming knowledge to make updates. The gallery owner felt bound at times and needed something simple that even she could log in and make edits herself.

The solution Green Pencil Media offered was a user-friendly platform that could be used to edit text, upload images and videos.  It also connected all their social media outlets to the website to better communicate with the public about events.  The gallery owner was very pleased with the functionality aspect of it as well as the style upgrade which gives it more of a clean and contemporary look which better suits the gallery’s style.

Many people have asked us why we have chosen the name Green Pencil Media. “Do you work with Eco-Friendly companies?”, they ask. I would be lying if I said we only work exclusively with Green companies, but it just so happens that lately we have had the pleasure to be working with such companies that are making a difference in our world.

Aside from working with Green companies, we like to offer Green Marketing services. We provide a much more affordable alternative than conventional marketing techniques which don’t require printing and can be done online.

SolarNet PTF
SolarNet PTF provides customized, solar-power systems for homes and businesses in the City Of Houston. It was founded to actively promote the solar electric agenda and educate the public. Working with utility companies, and public interest groups, SolarNet PTF is pushing to make Houston more energy independent while creating more jobs in the renewable energy sector.

The use of solar panels dramatically reduces the size of your carbon footprint. Solar energy is a renewable alternative to power plants that burn fossil fuels and emit greenhouse gases, which lead to global warming. The decision to go solar, made by thousands of people and businesses, reinforces Houston’s commitment to a healthy environment.

City of Sugar Land Recycling Program
Although this one is not a company, but a government entity, the City of Sugar Land takes their recycling program seriously.

The program encourages its residents to recycle items such as Newspapers, Magazines, Phonebooks, Aluminum Cans, Glass bottles and Plastic.

A test of the program in several Sugar Land neighborhoods resulted in a 260% increase in recycling, a benefit that results in less trash in area landfills.

In addition, their Green Waste Program ensures all green waste such as Grass clippings, Leaves, and Live christmas trees, will be taken to a composting facility and recycled into mulch or compost rather than sent to a landfill.

All About Doody
All About Doody is a Pet Waste Removal Service & Products. It is an environmentally friendly company, that offers pet waste removal for dog and cat owners in Houston and the surrounding area. Their service offers an answer to the question, “What to do with the dog waste in the yard?” Their  service keeps your yard free of dog waste and allows your family to once again enjoy the yard and by removing the dog waste you also eliminate a potential health hazard.

While it is not the best conversation one might have, the fact is that someone has to do it, and we appreciate them for doing so. As much as we enjoy our pets, it’s a problem that can not be ignored. Many people think it can work as fertilizer, but they are wrong. In fact, it is said that dog waste can also pollute our groundwater and is potentially harmful to our ecosystem. That alone makes me appreciate them, and I’m glad there is a service out there that is taking care of this issue.

As the Internet is quickly evolving, it has developed into one more channel for marketing a company’s products and services and its increased importance is mainly due to the growth in the online presence of consumers and potential costumers.

Email newsletters are now the most powerful and cost effective business marketing tool available to companies. For any company that intends to interact regularly with customers to update on new developments, mailing an eNewsletter is a good option. This is used mostly by companies that have a captive audience to send out regular updates. Also eNewsletters offer an immediate and convenient avenue for direct response (by hyperlinks to Web sites) and they can be individualized to meet the needs of specific users.

We didn’t realize how important E-Mail marketing would be to our own company until we began to see the results for ourselves. Each month we delivered a newsletter keeping our subscribers up-to-date in our achievements and services. On the June issue we reached out to our new client, All About Doody, which is a pet waste removal service. We were happy to learn that they care about our environment, and are making a big difference in keeping our parks and lawns clean in the Greater Houston Area.

What was exciting was to see them respond to the newsletter and submit a quote through our website requesting their own website redesign. It shows that the online process works, and our website is more than a showcase of our portfolio; it’s also a tool. A tool we like to offer all of our clients.

This channel, instead of just being transaction oriented, has become a tool for marketing for lead generation.
eMarketers are using all these tools for effective targeting and optimizing their mix in the above categories for marketing effectively.

One of the features to take advantage of is sectioning your client list to create email campaigns to a target audience. I’m sure Oil and Gas clientele would not care much for a Fashion campaign showing up in their inbox. They might even unsubscribe.

Another great feature is being able to track the results of each campaign. The performance of e-newsletters, like other online marketing, is measurable – almost from the minute the e-newsletter is sent out. Armed with metrics, you know exactly how well your e-newsletter is performing.

We hope this information has been useful, and if you’d like to hear more about our services, please contact us!

Many clients come to us with outdated and improperly built websites. We look at every aspect of the site and all the ways in which it can be improved. We then design and develop a website that not only looks better, is easier to navigate, but also ranks better and generates more calls.

Dr. Alicia, a chiropractor in New York City, has been a long-time loyal client, but recently she was interested in a website redesign. After reviewing her goals Green Pencil Media helped them to realize their vision. Green Pencil Media redesigned their website to convey the forward-thinking and health conscious practice that they are.

We noticed that it was outdated and it lacked practical functionalities. The first thing was that her previous website did not have a strong address. As we’ve previously mentioned in our articles, having a strong name with a keyword of a related service in the name, only raises the chances for search engines to find a website. So now instead of www.DrAliciaK.com it has changed to www.NYChiroHealth.com. The next thing we noticed was that her previous website was built in Flash, which again will make it difficult for search engines to find since they pick up on keywords within the website text.  So now she is in a CMS platform that allows her to update her website without any knowledge of HTML, and keep her content fresh and up-to-date which is something else that search engines like.

So in conclusion, her new website not only looks more professional, and is easier to navigate, it is also SEO ready and equipped with all her social media accounts so she is ready to market her new site. Now her website will become her best marketing tool!

The key to any successful business venture is to determine what’s your Return on Investment (ROI). Marketing is no exception to the rule, and neither are websites because it’s an interactive marketing piece. From the renown book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen Covey wisely advises to “begin with the end in mind.” In layman terms, start by defining the results you want and tailor everything you do to achieve those results. The return of investment are the desired end results. By setting them at the beginning of the web design process, it gives a way to measure how successful your efforts are and provides clearer direction and purpose to a website’s development. The ROI can be newsletter signups, purchases, amount of comments on a blog post, and etc. Everything you do should be tailored to accomplishing those end results. After all, content is king. So, is the content you’re providing producing the results you want? If it is, great! If it isn’t, the strategy needs to be reworked, but at least you know where you stand and where you want to go.

I had been mentioning to my friend lately that I wanted us to go check out more art shows. I just felt like I wanted to get back into the art scene. Sometimes I feel a disconnect with the every day life situations that I forget that I need some inspiration. So she invited me to an art opening of a friend of hers. She asked me if I knew where Canal Street was and I told her that I knew it far too well, since I grew up in the neighborhood.

The neighborhood is changing drastically with a metro rail being built to run right through it and new condos popping up every minute. It’s actually a pretty good location since it’s right in Houston’s downtown, right across from the Minute Maid Stadium.

Well as I gazed at the art during the show I felt so inspired and uplifted. I envisioned myself being part of these events, but little did I know that it would soon manifest. I saw the owner speaking to the staff and I saw how friendly she was, so I approached her and told her about my business. Well to be honest, she was really busy that night, but I gave her my business card.

We kept in touch and now I am delighted to say that we are working with Canal Street Gallery! We are helping the venue with marketing their upcoming events and know it will grow to fulfill future opportunities. We plan to coordinate different types of events for the gallery to attract new and interesting enthusiasts from wine tasting events, to fashion shows, and business networking events.

It’s so exciting, and if you happen to be in the Houston area, we hope to see you at these upcoming events. We will be posting these events as they happen via Facebook and other social media networks, so we’ll keep you informed, and I can’t wait to mix art with all these other events to bring an enriching and cultural experience.

March was such a busy month for us, I don’t know where it went! One of the main highlights of the month was definitely the SXSW Interactive Fest.  SXSW is known mainly for the live music concerts in Austin, but the Interactive, and the Film fests are picking up momentum more and more each year.

So what is SXSW Interactive? SXSW Interactive is an event that takes place in Austin, Texas every March that brings together people from all walks of technology; including programmers, bloggers, designers, tech enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs. Green Pencil Media was there this year and it was a great event to be a part of.  It took place from Friday to Tuesday with an array of choices of seminars to choose from. It was based in the downtown Austin area in different venues from hotels to the Austin Convention Center.

The seminars themselves were all great with the actual founders of programs and successful start ups. It was amazing to listen to likeminded individuals who understood what we believe in. The great thing about this event is that one can choose the seminars that best suits their industry.

Our main concentration at the moment is Social Media and Marketing, and the information was helpful. It may come to a surprise to many people that Social Media is already revolutionizing how we do business every day. It has brought in a real time approach to the whole shopping experience that can engage customers to participate in any phase of an actual purchase.  Traditional businesses see a one-way street when it comes to marketing, but it just isn’t what it used to be.

Large companies are already tapping into these platforms to check on consumer purchase habits, to collect data, and launch effective marketing strategies. Consumers are already adapting to technology and taking advantage of real time benefits. If someone wants to find the closest restaurant or shop, all they have to do check their phone and instantly acquire that data. But that’s not all; they can also look at ratings and choose which one they’d prefer.  All this information is now available at the palms of their hands in a matter of seconds.

Using one’s phone has taken the shopping experience to a new level. It allows consumers to scan an item and quickly learn what a company is about and what their beliefs are. As consumers, we still want to buy things, but we want to make smarter purchase choices.  People are starting to pick up feedback from others and want to know their experiences with the products. We are getting around the traditional in-your-face marketing with annoying ads by setting up pop-up blockers and such, and turning to a more social consumer environment.

Many people are afraid or intimidated to get into the mediasphere, but one must embrace change and be part of the trend and stop resisting. Businesses cannot control negative feedback of course because it’s impossible to please everyone, but what they can do is correct a problem real time and respond quickly with an apology, and consumers will take these things into account because they feel that someone cares and is listening to them. It’s about humanizing your brand, and that is what is so great about this two way street.

The concept of real time can be beneficial not only to large companies, but smaller companies can definitely take advantage of this approach as well. For instance if a taco truck has developed a fan base and it moves around the city, they can “check in” on Facebook and become a moving target letting their followers know where they will be.

So the question remains, “What are businesses doing to keep an edge between competitors?” People are already talking and rating businesses, so it is important to be part of this conversation because it is already taking place whether we like it or not.

Now that we have discussed the importance of having a business website work as a marketing tool, there are things to consider before even developing one. It’s the little things that make a huge difference in the long run. Before starting any project, you need to look at the bigger picture because once you begin, it’s hard to take steps back.

Domain Names and SEO:

The first thing to keep in mind is the selection of a domain name.

• The name that you select should be directly related to the nature of the business.
• If the business happens to contain a descriptive keyword, then you’re fine.
• The domain name should be attractive and easy to remember.
• The name should not have more than 25 characters.
• It should not include special characters like hyphens and dashes.
• The best domain names are those that are relatively short and memorable.

You should take advantage of this feature and optimize your URLs from an SEO perspective. When Google crawls a web page, it looks at the URL as one of the factors it considers to determine the relevance of a web page for a given keyword.

Since the domain name is part of all URLs on a given web site, it is often useful to have a keyword contained within your domain name. This is why keyword-rich domain names have become so popular recently.

The pool of unregistered, high-quality .com domain names with specific keywords is very limited. There’s now an after-market for domain names, where you can acquire domain names that have been previously registered by someone else. If you’re looking for a very high-quality domain name, you’re likely going to have to pay more than just the registration fee. You should consider creating your business name around a premium, high-quality domain name.

It really impresses me how many business out there do not take advantage of this simple step. This is the first and most important step to increasing your SEO. It even goes beyond that since you will use it in your business card, promotional items, and marketing collateral, and even your email. Which brings us to our next point.

Business Email:

Creating a good impression with a proper business email address is an important communication tool and using a business email address is far better than using your personal email address. Email for business should be kept separate from your personal email.  The email address with gmail.com, yahoo.com or hotmail.com in the latter part of the email address does not sound professional. The professional email address needs to be in the format of  ”admin (at) domain” ,”info (at) domain” “sales (at) domain” or “your name (at) domain”. You have the flexibility to choose.
Hire the service of a professional HTML designer to make the best of these small details of web designing.

Organized Design:

Good web design is necessary for the making of a successful website. All websites are not successful at generating sales and revenue. An attractive and appealing web design is equally important as the quality products or services offered through the website.

Just as a shop needs to be organized, a website needs to be properly organized too. The arrangement of the products or presentation of the service needs to be mentioned in an organized way in the shop as well as the website. This directly refers to the navigation as well. The website layout should be well organized to facilitate easy navigation. This means that the visitor should be easily and quickly able to find what he/she is searching for. If the shop is not well organized it is supposed to have a negative impact on the visitor. The same case applies with a visitor visiting any website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

No matter how attractive the interior design of the website is; it is useless if no one pays a visit to it. In the case of a website, the traffic or the number of visitor can be maximized by resorting to search engine optimization strategies. This involves inclusion of key words, key words phrases, easy navigation, regular updating, and embedding of incoming links and outgoing links.

Hire the professional services of an experienced web designer, get a good website design, maintain it regularly or get it maintained regularly and the website should yield good return on investment.

The website needs to be regularly updated with relevant information that is of interest to the visitors. The visitors usually like to see something new in the website every time they visit the website. A good way to do this is by having a blog, and updating it on a regular basis.

Blogging:

Many large and small businesses alike have recently discovered the great advantages of blogging in maintaining good communication relationships with both employees and customers. It is obvious that for some people, blogs have become a means of sharing information and expertise at very advanced levels and this can only mean increased profit for the company. It is a common knowledge by now that small businesses profit the most from blogging. Why? Because a highly specific web page such as a blog, successfully substitutes an extensive online presence. Instead of a static page, you offer a very dynamic blog where feed-back is encouraged and various issues get tackled with.

The key to getting good traffic is perseverance and service quality. Content has to be re-freshed every week if not more often. What’s in it for you? You make the user spend more time on the website and, consequently, you increase the chances of his or her returning to the blog in the future.

There’s a lot of advice from so called experts about the best way to market your website floating around the web. Most advocate starting free blogs and using social bookmarking sites and surfing around commenting on other people’s blogs in order to drive traffic to your own, and then to direct traffic from your blog to your website. But wouldn’t it be more effective and less time consuming to direct traffic to your website? Some of those techniques actually do work, but they only work on a small scale. If you’re a business owner that is thinking big and you want to start racking up some serious website hits you need to go beyond those small business marketing tools and use your resources more effectively.

What is the single most effective marketing tool that you have? It’s your website! Your website tells people about you, and about your products and services. It lets them sign up for more information or make purchases, and gives them information about you. Your website is the most important marketing tool you have, and how are you using it? Are you promoting your website directly or are you wasting time promoting a blog that leads back to your website? You should be focusing all of your efforts on your website if you want to get more internet traffic.

Here are simple things that you can do to make your website work harder for you: Update the content on your website on a regular basis. You don’t need to add new items everyday but you should be adding a few new things at least once a week. That will keep people coming back to your site on a regular basis to see what’s new. People will get tired of a heavy sales pitch really quickly and start surfing right on by your site.

Instead of boring them with the pitch use articles and other information to keep them interested and to give them a reason to come back to the site. Making your site an authority site on a niche topic that happens to sell products or services is a fantastic way to draw internet traffic. Search engine optimize everything. Search engine optimization is an absolute necessity if you want to get thousands or even millions of hits a day. No other type of Internet marketing will ever be as effective or drive as much traffic as search engine optimization will.

If you try to appeal to a broad audience you won’t be very effective. Trying to get your site noticed on the web is much easier when you focus on a small niche and do whatever you can to attract that niche market. Even if you think that niche is too small to give you the success that you’re looking for do it anyway. You might not have a huge local population interested in that niche, but you could find millions of people all over the world searching for that niche online.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dave_Morrow

It’s truly amazing when one has a vision and it slowly starts to materialize. That’s how this site was built. It was merely an idea at first, but through research and just talking to friends and colleagues, it soon began to take shape. This by no means was done alone. It took a talented team, and we are all proud of the end result. We know we will do the same for others to come. We are very confident in what we do and deliver that we have no doubt 2011 will be a successful year for us all.