…Yes we are taking care of business, everyday!
I’ve been doing a little website optimization lately and I was encouraged to see that we have a high website grade from Hubspot’s website grader tool. I think Hubspot is a great resource, btw. We’ve been getting free webinars packed with valuable information that has the most-up-to-date tools to use. The founders are Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, who met at MIT. I follow Dharmesh on his Linkedin Group OnStartUps for a community of entrepreneurs, another valuable resource. I highly recommend looking into their services.
Here’s our website badge. We received a 94 out of 100 for casartcoverings.com. That’s not bad at all. The grader goes through your website’s strengths and weaknesses so you can highlight or increase the former and improve the latter. Very helpful. After following some of their suggestions to get a higher grade, we received a 97…and we’re still working on it to improve even more, as this number fluctuates.
One of the suggestions was to add a contact form as well as a way to sign up for our newsletter. We were able to add the newsletter sign up from Constant Contact, our newsletter service. People who sign up here will receive first-hand news of our new designs as well as special discounts. It was also suggested to add a Facebook like/ send button at the bottom of every post. We did this; however, Lindsey discovered an all-in-one-tool-bar from Wibiya, which allows for the above plus has a search and an interactive click to share window that frames different elements of your post or webpage for multiple sharing opportunities. This bar also travels with you as you scroll down the page, so if you see something you like, you don’t have to go searching for that like button, it’s right there.
I should also mention that we have some top notch interns helping us. Many thanks to our interns!
We think it is important for business to check your analytics as much as possible, because without having a tracking system, you do not have figures that give you accurate information. We use Google Analytics for this reason + bitly for our Twitter to help tell us know where people find us. How they search for us, as well as what posts they retweet. Hubspot also has a Tweet Grader and we received an 86 out of 100. I was surprised to see that Ashton Kutcher is not one of the top twitter users, but Justin Bieber — his fan site is.
We use sitemeter to keep track of where people come into our blog (entry links) and where they exit (out links).
All of these are free business tools to use.
Even though this is technical “futuristic” stuff, I thought I’d end with an appropriate blast from the past, here’s Taking Care of Business by the BTO, Backman Turner Overdrive, for those who remember this:
Clicking our butterfly in the column to the left brings you to our social media platforms.
Now it’s back to business.
— Ashley
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