Cross Creative

Cool Creative Ways To Use Your Camera Phone

gregcross — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:03:13 +0000

Everyday you carry around your cell phone and if you’re cell phone is like most phones sold today it’s got a cool camera built in. Well if you’re like me you forget that the darn thing is there. Below are some cool ideas on how to better leverage your cell phone camera. P.S. That’s my cell phone camera on the left – I love my Palm Treo 800w

Remember where you’re parked at the airport or any crowded lot. Photograph the nearest parking location sign.
Take a picture of your hotel, building address, room number, and the nearest street sign.
Take a photo of your child every day as a safety precaution when you’re traveling.
Capture a whiteboard after a meeting.
Document damage after a car accident.
Document your home and belongings as proof for your insurance company in the event of a loss.
Snap a picture of the takeout menu and business hours of your favorite restaurant.
Shoot a photo of a flyer for an upcoming event or item for sale.
If you lend out CDs, DVDs and books to friends, take pictures and label them with your friends’ names.
Take a picture of something you’re about to disassemble, then use it as a reference when you’re putting it back together.
Entertain kids with a photo scavenger hunt, with a list of things to take pictures of.
Photograph yourself when you don’t have a mirror.
Snap a picture of important people you meet, and add that photo to your contacts. People don’t mind, and it really helps you later connect faces to names.

What creative ways have you used your cell phone camera?

>>> More ways to use your cell phone camera

Greenfield Daily Reporter Interview with Greg Cross

gregcross — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 03:05:01 +0000

Greg Cross owns Cross Creative, a professional web design company that serves business, non-profit, church and social media clients. The Daily Reporter asked him some questions about technology and social networking.

Reporter: How did you get into Web site design and the whole technology scene? How have you seen things change over the years?

Cross: I got into the whole website and technology front more out of sheer fascination. I got my first computer in 1989. It was a PC – an 8086 processor, which compared to today’s PCs was slow. From there my affinity and passion for technology grew. What is perhaps a greater passion of mine is helping my clients leverage digital marketing strategies, which when done right has a greater long-term impact than traditional marketing strategies.

Reporter: Define “Web 2.0″ and explain how it’s different from what preceded it.

Cross: “Web 2.0″ is a newer generation of websites that are about “user-generated” content. The whole Web 2.0 experience allow users to collaborate, share information, opinions, comments, ideas, links, ratings, bookmarks, reviews, pictures, videos, and more. It really puts the user in the driver’s seat when visiting a website that has Web 2.0 elements present.

Read the entire interview here

10 Great Apps for Twitter Users

gregcross — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:17:51 +0000

Harry McCracken over at PC World has a great list of apps and tools that will give your tweeting experience a boost. One of my favorites that makes his lists is Tweet Deck – by far the best app to keep track of all of your tweets. Click here

Other great sites that list Twitter Applications:

1oo Most Popular Twitter Apps

Twittermania” 140+ More Twitter Applications Tools

47 Awesome Twitter Tools You Should Be Using

Twitter Tools for Community and Communication Professionals

Joopz Me Baby!

gregcross — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 01:28:03 +0000

I love my new Joopz account! What is Joopz you ask? Joopz is a Web 2.0 application that lets me send and recieve FREE text messages to cell phones via a web-based platform. I am still playing around with it. However, I am very excited at the huge potential it has to communicate with my clients. Simply put Joopz allows me to text someone a specifc SMS text.

A unique feature that I am really loving about Joopz is that it allows me to g’roup message’ text messages to groups that I set up – unlimited groups. This feature holds great promise as a businesss communication tool. For example, I n my Joopz acount I set up a group called “Clients.” I have added all of my clients cell phone numbers to this group. Now I am ready to send specific SMS text messages. I own a website design and development company and this feature will be especially helpful to communicate with my clients whenever a server is down for support purposes or if I need to alert them to something specific about web updates to thier domain. Plus, with two-way text messaging my clients can text me back via their cell phones and I can respond by typing a reply text via my laptop, not through my Palm Treo 800 keyboard.

Joopz even has an Outlook Plugin. With this feature, you can now send and receive text messages directly from your Outlook e-mail. Best of all, the Joopz plug-in automatically syncs with your Outlook address book so you can send a text message to anyone in your Outlook address book along with your Joopz contacts.

Try Joopz today – it’s free to try – they do have a premium service that allows you to send and receive unlimited text messages – all for only $19.95 a year. A great deal!

Click to visit Joopz.com

REASON #7 – SAVVY PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMERS ARE LOOKING FOR YOU – YES YOU!

gregcross — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:50:31 +0000

Top 10 Reasons Why Your Website Should Be Your Top Business Priority in 2009

When is the last time you picked up a “yellow book?” If you are under the age of 21 you may not even know what a yellow book is, in fact, my twelve year old looked at me very weird the other day when I asked him to go into my office and get me the “yellow pages.”

Millions of savvy, prospective customers everyday jump on a browser and search for products and services. Is your company there to make a virtual handshake with them?

Understand Google’s Guidelines

gregcross — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:00:23 +0000

From Jon Rognerud, Courtesy of Entrepreneur.com

Meet Google, the “coolest kid” on the cyberblock!

Google is popular, and popularity means it may be tough to get in initially. Even if you do everything right, it could take months to see results, at least if you use their URL submission page. However, there is hope! There’s a method to get indexed in 24 hours, so don’t even bother submitting through the URL page.

But before you get to that, you should know about the guidelines you must follow to ensure that your site not only gets listed, but also doesn’t get banned. Plus, you should learn about elements of your website that Google won’t look at.

How to Get Google to Read Your Keywords First

Google’s bots read web pages from the topmost left corner of your site to the bottom right. However, most sites are designed with all of the links on the left side, and the content on the right. In fact, earlier in this book you learned that this is the recommended website design you should use. Yet the problem with this design is instead of seeing your content first, Google sees the links first. Your links may not be seen to be as optimized as your content.

One solution is to use three panes rather than two. Keep the normal left and right panes, but add an extra pane at the top left of the layout. Don’t put keywords in this extra pane. With this area “blank” when the Google bots read the site, rather than going for the links as they normally would, the bots see that a portion of where the links are is “blank.” This then forces it to read the content first, which is more keyword-rich than the links.

Note that not all search engines read sites this way, which is why this guideline was provided in this special section dedicated to optimizing for Google. You could be on the safe side and use the layout anyway, especially if you do plan to submit to Google, which you should. It doesn’t take away from the look of the site, and by using it you ensure that your content gets read first. If you don’t use it, you aren’t giving yourself the best opportunity to rank highly in Google search engine listings. Making tables isn’t very hard to do. Most word processors and even WYSIWYG HTML editors provide them, so take advantage of it.

Read the entire post here

Search Engine Optimization for Your Web Site

gregcross — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:32:22 +0000

Whether your Web site is brand new or ten years old, managing how it appears to search engines is crucial to its success. The typical Web site gets 61 percent of its traffic from organic (nonpaid) search engine results, and 41 percent of all traffic from Google alone. Ensuring that the company’s site ranks highly in search results is, for most businesses, a make-or-break proposition, which is why search engine optimization (SEO) is now a multibillion-dollar industry.

No one knows exactly what combination of tactics will maximize a Web site’s ranking in search results, but a lot of smart people have developed some good approximations based on history and empirical evidence. I asked three experts–Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, and Michael H. Fleischner, author of SEO Made Simple –about what tips and tricks they thought someone just starting out in the SEO game ought to know. The best and brightest of their recommendations follow.

Know What Keywords to Optimize

Search engine optimization is useless if you don’t know what you’re trying to optimize. For some businesses, picking appropriate keywords is straightforward: A candy merchant would probably choose candy, chocolate, and similar terms. But other business sites face more-difficult decisions. What terms should an online store that sells many different products emphasize? And how should a general-interest Web site that covers a wide range of topicsdetermine which search terms to focus on?

For starters, you should base your decisions about which terms relevant to your business to optimize on which terms people are searching for most often. One way to gauge search term popularity is to use an online keyword tool designed to see measure what general terms are searched for the most. Both the Google Keyword Tool and the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool can help you get a quick, accurate sense of the search volume for any term of your choice, and they will recommend related terms that you might not have thought of.

Ultimately it’s a numbers game: You need to optimize for terms that drive the highest traffic and are the most relevant to what your Web site offers. Optimizing your site for terms that no one ever types into a search engine won’t generate any traffic for the site, no matter how conscientiously you pursue the optimization. So before you do anything else, carefully select a handful of relevant high-interest terms for optimizing.

Focus on Title Tags and URLs

Experts agree that your title tags should be central to your SEO efforts. When it comes to indexing content, search engines treat the words in these tags–the text that appears in the title bar in your browser–as the most important single element on a Web page. For that reason, you should load it with your keywords, and make every title tag on your site unique. Danny Sullivan says that you should think of the tags as being like the titles of hundreds of books that you’ve published and want potential customers to be able to find: “If you give them all the same title, no one knows they are about different things.”

Years ago many people thought that URL structure was irrelevant and that only the actual content of a page really mattered. But search engines today consider keywords in your URLs much as they do keywords on the page itself. Though most publishing systems make it easy to use keywords in URLs, though many such systems (like WordPress) default to simplistic URLs that consist of numbers instead of including keywords.

It is well worth your while to take the time to make keywords part of your URL structure. Thereafter, a piece about Quantum of Solace (for example) will look more like www.pcworld.com/quantum-of-solace instead of like www.pcworld.com/11/&id=27. And readable URLs don’t just help search engines, says Rand Fishkin; they help users, too.

Each page of content on your site should link to by only one URL. Multiple URLs that refer to a single page of content can confuse search spiders.

Be Aware of How Others Link to You

I love it when readers link to Filmcritic.com, my movie review Web site, but a link like Filmcritic.com is cool has far positive impact on the ranking my site receives from search engines than a link like movie reviews. Why? Because search engines take into account the anchor text used to link to a site.

If you want to rise up in the rankings for a certain keyword or phrase, you need to encourage others to use those keywords in the anchor text for the link to your site, instead of just using the name of your site. To make this easy, you can provide the actual HTML code you’d like the linking site to use: Many linkers will simply copy and paste it on their Web site rather than taking the trouble to customize it themselves.

Spell Correctly–or Have a Good Reason Not To

Your site (and especially your keywords) need to be free of spelling errors. Typos can be a huge problem for eBay sellers, who can’t figure out why no one is bidding on their “Tiffanny” bracelets. On the other hand, including the incorrect form of certain words that are frequently misspelled can work for you. For example, about 5 percent of searchers misspell “absinthe” as “absinth,” so it may be wise to include the misspelled term as a secondary keyword to supplement the correctly spelled version of the word.

Mind the Flash

Flash-based Web sites look pretty, but search engines don’t care about that. Sullivan notes that the closer your content is to plain text, the more easily and completely search engines will be able to spider it. Search engines today are better at working with Flash than they used to be, but if you’re more interested in strong search results than in a flashy interface, text and HTML are still the way to go.

Resist Duplicate Content and Plagiarism

One of the most difficult SEO problems to remedy is the issue of duplicate content–the tendency of others on the Web to steal your work and republish it as their own. All search engines are terrible at recognizing which version of a page is the original one, and you may very well be penalized as a duplicate page if an engine fails to recognize who was copying who. The penalty is severe, too: Duplicate sites won’t show up in search results unless the searcher clicks the search engine’s link for “repeat the search with the omitted results included,” which no one ever does.

To deal with cases of plagiarism, many Web hosts have a mechanism for reporting abuses such as copyright infringement. (For example, the Google Blogger service has a notification system.) The process can be tedious, but your efforts will pay off handsomely if they help you reverse penalties that are unfairly being assessed against you.

Give OnlyWire a Try

Michael Fleischner says that he’s seen clients achieve great success in getting word out about their content by using OnlyWire, which lets you automatically submit a page of content to more than 20 social bookmarking sites with a single click. OnlyWire also gives you the option of embedding a “bookmark & share” link on your pages that permits other visitors to do the same. For best results, Fleischner says, “Individuals should bookmark their home page and channel-level pages once per month and get others to do the same.” Submitting select content to major social news sites such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon can produce occasional floods of traffic, too, but that strategy is very hit-or-miss. Ans beware of oversubmitting to social news sites, lest you be branded a spammer.

Use Word Clouds to Link Internally

If you drop a word cloud (or tag cloud) on your home page, according to Fleischner, internal linking to your content “takes care of itself.” Linking from one page to another within your Web site–no matter how you achieve it–helps improve your site’s search result ranking.

Put Quality First

It may seem too obvious to bear mentioning, but the quality of your Web site’s content must come first in any SEO strategy. Search-engine results are, to a large extent, driven by the number of incoming links to your content, whether these links come from blogs, news stories, or social news sites like Digg. Unless you give visitors a compelling reason to link to your pages, you won’t get these links and you won’t rise up in the search rankings–no matter how frequently your keywords appears on your home page. Write provocative blog posts. Create entertaining and original promotional copy for the merchandise in your catalog. Include photos and videos on your pages. Do whatever you can to set yourself apart from and above the millions of other sites on the Web.

Don’t Let SEO Get in the Way

A final piece of sound advice from Fishkin: “SEO should never have to compete with user experience or usability. What’s good for users is almost always good for engines, too, so building the best Web site you can–with the best content, design, and architecture–will go a long way to bringing you success with search engine rankings. Just make sure that whatever you build, search engines have easy access to it, and you’ll be miles ahead of the pack.”

This article was originally found on PC WORLD – Author | Christopher Null | Thursday, December 04, 2008 9:00 AM PST

REASON #8 – A WEBSITE IS THE MOST COST EFFECTIVE SELLING FORCE BY FAR

gregcross — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:03:36 +0000

Top 10 Reasons Why Your Website Should Be Your Top Business Priority in 2009

Your website when designed and developed correctly is a 24/7 selling machine. Think about it. Your website is working for you around the clock, reaching out and touching new customers. Let’s say you hired a marketing person to grow your sales this fiscal year. As a top-notch marketing guru, this person’s resume demanded an annual salary of $100K. Let’s do some simple math:

Marketing Guru Cost
40 hour work week x 52 weeks = 2080 hours
$100,000.00 ÷ 2080 = $48.00/hr

Website Selling Machine
24 hour work week X 365 = 8760 hours
$100,000.00 ÷ 8760 = $11.41

Now granted most small business websites cost no where near $100K to implement, but you get my point. A website is the most cost effective selling force that any small business can utilize in today’s economy. The number of potential customers contacted via your website and the relatively modest costs involved put the ROI of a website far ahead of other sales approaches, such as paid advertising or visits by sales representatives.

So, why doesn’t your small business have a website?

REASON #9 – IT TAKES TIME TO CREATE DOMAIN NAME BUZZ FOR YOUR SITE

gregcross — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:16:54 +0000

Top 10 Reasons Why Your Website Should Be Your Top Business Priority in 2009

So many people think if they launch a new website on a Monday that they should show up on a Google search for that new website on a Tuesday. Let me just bust this myth by saying – it does not happen that way.

Imagine sending out an invitation to some friends inviting them to come to your home for dinner. The purpose for inviting them was to see your new house you just finished building. The invitations go out, but there was one catch – you neglected to provide them your address. As the appointed time for your dinner came and went you quickly became very puzzled why your visitors never came to your home. You had built this beautiful new home and now no one showed up. The next day you bumped into some of your invited guests and you asked them “Why didn’t you come last evening to my home for dinner?” Their reply? “WE COULD NOT FIND YOU!”

Thousands and thousands of customers are looking for your website, your home on the internet … will they be able to find you? It’s not enough to just have a website or a nice looking home page. People need to be able to find you on the internet. You can help them better find you through Search Engine Optimization.

When you do have a website, you want the Search Engines to put it high in Search Engine Ranking Reports for the important keywords for your business. This does not happen overnight. Usually it will take 2 months or more to begin to get good rankings. So the earlier you start, the better you will succeed.

REASON #10 – WITHOUT A STRONG WEBSITE, YOU LEAVE THE FIELD TO THE COMPETITION

gregcross — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:09:50 +0000

Top 10 Reasons Why Your Website Should Be Your Top Business Priority in 2009

If you are in business you cannot afford to let your competition stand out in an already crowded playing field. How you do business in 2009 is different. Change is not coming – it’s here! If you are in business and do not have a website then shame on you. Set aside my industry bias here for a minute. Not having a website is giving your competition the edge Bottom line: you’re losing business if you do not have a website.

It’s estimated that there are now 337,167, 248 internet users in North America (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats14.htm) While you are reading this someone is going on the internet and using it to find potential products or services that they need and want. Are they finding what they need on your website? The great thing about the internet is that it truly does level the playing field for those in business. A new competitor with limited funds can be highly visible on the web. If your company isn’t there, then the competitor may be the only visible provider to the untapped clients you are trying to reach.

It’s also important not to allow the competitor to be the first one with a website. It takes some time for a website to establish itself on the Internet with the search engines. If your competitor steals a lead on you, then you may find it difficult to catch up.