I have been working in WordPress for a very short time. In the last year and a half I had to learn how to develop WordPress sites, how to SEO them, how to change their entire look and feel, integrate different platforms with WordPress and so much more. The online world is changing so fast and its hard to keep up with Google and all the other systems out there, so I had pull a Trinity | Matrix move and do a quick information upload to learn at the speed of light.

The result: WordPress is fun, and easy to build website with! Yes, there is some techie stuff that gets a bit complicated, but for the basic needs of the average business there is no easier way to manage your online presence than WordPress, and it can do so many things to make certain aspects of your run business more smoothly. I have realized that most businesses these day absolutely require an online presence to ensure sales.

So my message to you today is simple; Dont be afraid of the ever changing online world, its much easier than you think. A little bit of WordPress plus a little bit of Flatspin techi abilities plus a little bit of training from Flatspin and you will be well on your way to managing your own online presence with ease.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a digital scrapbooking platform. It allows individuals to create virtual pin boards featuring images of items that they like or that have piqued their interest in some way. Essentially Pinterest allows consumers to promote products and services for free. Pins can be pinned onto different boards that are divided into categories such as recipes, fashion, decor, etc. The key to success on Pinterest is to make your images “pinnable”, in other words, making your images aesthetically appealing enough to consumers so that they will be encouraged to “repin” them to their personal boards exposing your product or service to a different and potentially larger audience.

Will Pinterest work for your business?

Before starting your Pinterest marketing campaign, it’s important to get to grips with some of the site’s core statistics:

• More than 90% of Pinterest users are female meaning that the site is dominated by women.
• 21% of Pinterest users have purchased something that they found on a pinboard.
• The most popular categories for pinboards are home (17%), arts & crafts (12%), style & fashion (12%) and food (10%).

Do you think Pinterest is the right choice for your brand? Get in touch with Flatspin for a personalized Pinterest quote and proposal of how we can make Pinterest work for you.

Here are some creative ways in which your brand can use Pinterest:

1. Hold a contest – In recent months “Pin It to Win It” style Pinterest contests have become very popular. These contests typically encourage Pinterest users to go onto a brand or business’s website or blog and to pin images from it that they find appealing to their personal Pinterest boards. The winner then wins either an item or a service depicted in one of the images that they pinned. This kind of contest encourages audience engagement with your product or service and also gets them to browse through your offerings.
2. Conduct Market Research – Pinterest is a great way of testing new products and services. Pinterest can offer a kind of online focus group by allowing you to track reactions to products and services. Tracking whether certain colours or styles get repined often is a good way for retailers to stay on top of trends and to launch products and services that are in line with those trends.
3. Feature Customers – Playing to your customer’s vanity is a good way of ensuring their brand loyalty and of getting them to share information about your business on various social media platforms. Featuring customers who wear their clothing in unique ways on Pinterest has proven to be a valuable marketing tool for the fashion industry. It can also be valuable for businesses that offer venues or events to create specific boards that capture the feel that the customer wants the venue or event to adopt.
4. Collaborate with Customers – Pinterest allows you to add multiple contributors to one board meaning that various people will be able to pin images to the same place. Allowing customers to pin to your boards provides a way of finding out what direction that they might like to see your brand moving into. It’s also a great way for event planners, bakers, photographers, travel agents and art dealers to work with customers to create an end-product that will satisfy both parties seeing as these are professions that require close communication between consumers and producers.
5. Create a brand personality – Pinterest is great way of creating and communicating your brand personality to your audience. You can use Pinterest to showcase your unique style, what you stand for and what makes you different.
6. Promote image content – With Pinterest you can collate all of your image content into one place which makes it easy to access. You can feature anything from product photos, personal photography to infographics. Travel agents for example will be able to reap benefits from this highly visual platform by creating boards with photos of activities, landscapes, accommodation and special offers in different areas.
7. Sell, sell, sell – You can add price banners and links to your website on your Pinterest images to have those pins translate into sales sooner.

If you feel that Pinterest would be beneficial to your Brand or Company, you can contact Flatspin here to discuss your needs and how best to implement an account for your business.

The great thing about social media is that it can be used to suit any business and any budget. No matter what the size or nature of your business, you can use a combination of social media forums to reach your target market and promote your strengths, products and services.

So what exactly is “Social Media”? It is a form of web-based marketing that uses a selection of relevant social media forums in order to best achieve marketing and branding communication and goals.

In South Africa, the “Big 5” are considered to be Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Pinterest and LinkedIn. As a business owner, it is vital that you know what you want to say and to whom. That information will enable you to choose which social media platforms you want to use and how.

Together, these platforms offer networking, video clips, images, info sharing, community engagement, competition campaigns, linking, tracking, measuring and so much more. Almost all the basic offerings are free of charge but in most cases it is best to get a professional marketer to manage your social media for you. Marketing online is very complex and can be just as harmful as it can be beneficial to your brand.

One thing is for certain, if you have any sort of business; small or large, local, national or international, you should be using social media to create an online awareness and to increase your sales.

So, what is website management then, I hear you ask? Website management is the practise of managing a website for yourself, another person, or another company, like you would manage a business, or business department? Simple yes? Yet that explanation still leaves many in the dark.

So perhaps the more pertinent question to ask at this juncture, is “Why is website management necessary?” this would then swiftly be followed by “and why does it matter to me, the small business owner? Surely my website can manage itself? Afterall, it’s managed perfectly fine without it’s own personal manager for the past 10 years?”

Therein lies the answer. 10 years ago it was enough to just have a website. Make website. Add address to business card. Forget. In the vastness that was the interweb, ones website acted as beacon in the dark, a charming virtual business card that demonstrated how “progressive” you and your business were and marketed you to those clients savvy enough to be able to search the net.

Flash to the present and this is no longer the case. In the interim, every intrepid entrepreneur and his puppy has cottoned onto the website idea, the vastness of the interweb has been stuffed to bursting with a million other “charming virtual business cards”, and every human being over the age of 5 is now capable of searching the net using their mobile phones and those behemoth platforms known as search engines. The face of the internet has changed, and so too has the function of the website.

The positive side of these developments is that your audience has multiplied a thousand if not a million fold and the internet has developed into a marketing and sales tool second to none, with more reach than was ever thought possible. The negative side to this coin however is that the website you were once so proud of has vanished into insignificance within the endless influx of new websites and upgraded search engine algorithms.

The internet can now provide you with the means to turn your “charming virtual business card” into a potent marketing and sales asset. Your website can come to represent not just a means of contact and minor marketing, but a storefront, point of sale, endless access to instantly updatable advertising and a vehicle for retrieving measured statistics and results to demonstrate real time ROI. Your website can now be seen not only as a marketing tool, but something worth marketing and managing in its own capacity.

Re-enter the concept of website management. What is website management? It is the process of maintaining, administering and updating your site so that it performs as well for you online as any other aspect of your business does and can. And why is it important to you, the small business? Because no matter the size of your company, having a website and not tapping into the exposure potential of todays online universe is a bit like having a winning lottery ticket and not cashing it?

Top-level domain registrars, the one’s who register and ensure your .com’s and .org’s etc. are all automated – to the point where moving your domain from one registrar or host to another, is a quick fill-in-the-online-form procedure. These huge registrars have got their systems finely tuned to handle mass volumes.

On the other hand, here in South Africa, we have a long way to go. In this case, our client had registered their domain with Mweb in 1997. Clearly, Mweb is now a giant on our local scene, and have come a long way since then.  But the email address they registered with the registrar, Network Solutions, became defunct, when they overhauled their domains department in 2006. So, our little domain transfer exercise, which should take a few clicks here and there over a day or so, has become a complete fiasco…

Try no less than 23 calls over a 16 day stretch, and still receive no resolution!

Guys – it’s all the same. Once you sign up with these big boys, they’re quick to bill big numbers, but slow to deliver any real support. Or at least the channels involved are so convoluted that nothing functions. Phone a call centre, spend your own precious time holding, and then get transferred to the correct (yeah right!) department, or better, get given another number… only to find that the person you’re now dealing with is powerless to assist, or has absolutely no technical grounding to be able to help in the first place. Mix it with complete inefficiency and a total will to pass the buck up the chain of command to the next person in the organisation (!?) who is equally incapable or unwilling to help.

The moral of the story? Well, don’t use them in the first place – rather pay for real service, deal with a real person who has your interests firmly at heart. Vote with your feet; hopefully sometime, someone at the top making the big bucks will pay attention to the service delivery debacle on their very doorstep…

Use smaller companies who know what’s going on and really need to help. Their salaries depend on it… Not saying that we like dealing with these issues in particular, but would you prefer to, based on the story above and many similar?

Mweb – nothing personal, it’s not only you, but this really happened, and it’s ongoing…

While some of our names and faces might be new, the company ethos is still the same: to ensure that you, the client and the company,  get the absolute best representation on line. And we have streamlined our processes, offerings and staff to do just this, give you all the individual attention and dedication that your company deserves. Your baby is our baby, and that’s the way we want it to stay.

Yes we have changed some of our platforms, and you might find that we do things a little differently than before, but here’s the point: With a creature as constantly in flux as the internet, doesn’t it please you to know that we are willing to adapt, learn and change as quickly as it does?

At Flatspin, we are constantly striving to offer you the latest on line developments, our impetus is on understanding these new developments, be they tech, traffic or socially oriented, and drawing back the veil for you too. After all, wouldn’t you as a company owner wish to be privy to the mystical and complicated world that is IT, as far as it applies to YOUR baby, of course? Or at least feel secure in the knowledge that the people handling your site know what they are doing, and can explain it to you, clearly and thoroughly, at the drop of a hat?

Perhaps the main thing you need to know about us newbies, and the revamped site, however, is that we LOVE what we do! I mean that with a capital L. And as I’m sure you know, when a person loves his or her job, there is a level of dedication, and pride in the execution of that work that cannot be surpassed.

Flatspin, you see, is our baby, and we are completely invested in its growth. Flatspin’s growth is completely reliant on our ability to meet your needs, ergo, we are invested in you. And isn’t that how it should be?

We’ve been putting WordPress sites together since 2008, but following the release of Version 3 late last year, we decided to upgrade as many of our sites as possible into this format. Web standards are applied effortlessly – no more awkward, proprietary interfaces, hand-coding, slips or omissions in creating extra search traffic. We can now focus our efforts on creating sites that attract search queries.

It’s taken us longer than we would have liked to get our own site up, but for good reason – since embarking on our new strategy, we’ve been overwhelmed with new work. Clients come first, so like the the shoemakers children, ours had to take a back seat for a while.

We hope you enjoy our new look and new offerings.