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How to Promote Your Business by Entering Contests

Posted: Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Receiving an award for your business can increase your company’s credibility. Participating in events like these can generate valuable exposure to the business community and the media loves to cover these events and often interviews participants for stories. Your local chamber of commerce, small business administration center or trade association may sponsor an awards event.

Many contests charge an entry fee so you must weigh the cost against the value of participating. If the rewards and/or exposure are great, the entry fee can easily pay for itself. Winners will be honored at an awards dinner at a small business conference in Las Vegas with keynote speaker Jay Conrad Levinson (author of the ever popular Guerrilla Marketing series of books). Deadline for entry is December 31, 2005.

The Webby Awards
(http://www.WebbyAwards.com) are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence in website design. There are over sixty categories including Arts, Blog, Community, Events, Games, Lifestyle, Health, Sports, Travel, and Weird.

The Stevies Awards for Women Entrepreneurs
(http://www.StevieAwards.com) honors winners from 18 categories including Best Company, Best Entrepreneur, Best New Product, Lifetime Achievement, and Women Helping Women. This contest is open to all U.S. based women-owned businesses with fewer than 100 employees. The folks at InsideBlogging.com hosted their first.

Business Blogging Awards
(http://www.businessbloggingawards.com/) in 2005. Some of the categories included Best Blogs: Overall, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Marketing, About Small Business, and PR. Watch for updates from this site and an announcement on a new contest for Technology Awards.

While entering awards may not be a traditional venue for marketing your business, it can certainly pay off in exposure and other opportunities. Soon your advertising strategy may shift to hype your “Award Winning” business.

A. Top 9 Basic Web Design Tips For Small and Medium Enterprises
Building a website for a small and medium enterprise can be a stress free experience If handled efficiently. Follow these 10 basic web site design tips and they will make your task much easier.

1. Own Your Project: It’s your site, your investment on the line. Be prepared to lead and keep the momentum heading towards a realistic launch date. If you don’t have the time to manage the construction of the site, hire someone who does.

2. Choose Your Color Scheme and Layout: Search the web and choose a few sites featuring the colors and layouts you like and a few sites with colors and layouts you don’t like.

3. Decide on Theme and Images: Choose your images with a common theme in mind and make sure your concept is easy to understand. Merging light and dark backgrounds can make the best images look out of place. You can find a great variety of royalty free images on Fotosearch.com.

4. Plan Your Site Structure: Write your site structure down on paper or use an excel spreadsheet; otherwise, it might get out of control.

5. Hire a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Firm: Your developer should have SEO experience or be working with an SEO firm. You can find top SEO firms advertising on Searchenginewatch.com or go to Google and type in search engine optimization and visit some SEO sites.

6. Meet Suggested Deadlines: A good web design firm will give you target dates for images, content, keyword development and site structure.

7. Begin With Keyword Research: Participate in the keyword research but trust your SEO partner. Start with Google Suggest, a free keyword tool. Start typing your keyword phrase. Google Suggest will show you a drop down list with numerous alternative keyword phrases that might be valuable to your business. Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool provides free
results as well.

8. Start Writing Your Content Now: You can edit their work before you site goes live and your SEO firm should have a hand in the final product. You can find a list of award winning content writers at TopSEOS .com. should you decide to outsource your content development.

9. Edit The Site Yourself: Once the site is complete, review every page for spelling mistakes, graphic mishaps, incorrect internal linking and unnecessary links to the SEO or developer sites. Review your site in Internet Explorer and Firefox to make sure it is consistent both web browsers. Anticipate delays in your project but keep the pedal to the metal until the site
is operational.

B. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Custom Web Site Design For Small to Midsize-Businesses
Quality of content-rich Websites are Needed:
Constructing superb content rich web pages may take a bit of strategical skills. Assuring a pristine architecture is crucial to the online world in marketing of web based content rich pages that will draw and also please consumers and fans. In simple terms, developing award winning web pages is not good enough to stay in business online. Web pages need proper visibility for prospects in order to be recognized as a credible, authentic and reliable place to either seek out more information or purchase products.

Implementing web design, development, and internet marketing with tunnel vision traffic generation techniques and strategies that are vital to the prosperity of your website. Focus exclusively on how to drive massive traffic online with internet marketing strategies through website design, search engine placement, search engine marketing, submission, analytics, email, backlinking and social media optimization. The bottom line is to achieve high quality traffic to your web pages that converts into multiple sources of revenue.

Search Engine Optimization and Web Design must go hand in hand:
A search engine optimization specialist is needed before the site is created, not after. Web page architectures normally should be created according to what the target audience seeks for online.

Search Engine Optimization Specialists should perform keyword research to find words and phrases being sought out on search engines to determine which keyword and phrases are best. A wide range of people have a difficult time searching a web page via the major search engines without campaign marketing and advertising.


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