Sep 20 / 2013
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Lake Havasu City Website Design- What Colors Mean, III

Good morning folks!

Are you ready for today’s color psychology?

“Color Psychology

Green is the color of nature and health. It represents growth, nature, money, fertility and safety. Green is a relaxing color that is easy on the eye and has a healing power to it. It is often used to represent anything having to do with health. Many pharmaceutical and nutritional companies use green in their logos and material to advertise safe natural products. Dark green is commonly associated with the military, money, finance, and banking. However it can also be associated with being new or inexperienced as being green or a “green horn”. Green is becoming a very popular color in design for web sites.

Blue is a cool calming color that shows creativity and intelligence. It is a popular color among large corporations, hospitals and airlines. It is a color of loyalty, strength, wisdom and trust. Blue has a calming effect on the psyche. Blue is the color of the sky and the sea and is often used to represent those images. Blue is a color that generally looks good in almost any shade and is a popular color among males. Blue is not a good color when used for food as there are few blue foods found in nature and it suppresses the appetite.”

Sep 18 / 2013
0

Graphic Design

Lake Havasu City Website Design- What Colors Mean, II

Howdy!

Today’s colors just happen to be fall colors, which is perfect for this time of year. Want to know the color psychology of orange and yellow? Check it out below!

“Color Psychology

…continued…

Orange is a combination of Red and Yellow. It is also a bright and warm color. It represents fire, the sun, fun, warmth and tropical images. It is considered a fun light color that has appetizing qualities to it. Orange increases oxygen supply to the brain and stimulates mental activity. It is highly accepted among young people. As a citrus color, orange is associated with healthy food and stimulates appetite. Any design relating to the tropics, something fun, easy going and youthful should incorporate some type of orange into the design. A darker, richer shade of orange can be associated with autumn.

Yellow is the brightest color to the human eye. It represents youth, fun, happiness, sunshine and other light playful feelings. It is a cheerful energetic color. Yellow is often used for children’s toys and clothes. Yellow is often hard to read when placed on a white background so designers must be careful when using yellow, that it isn’t’t too difficult to read or notice. Though yellow is a bright cheerful color, as it starts to darken it, however, quickly becomes a dirty and unpleasant color. Yellow can also be associated with being scared and, cowards. The term “yellow belly” is proof of that.”

…to be continued…

Sep 16 / 2013
0

Graphic Design

Lake Havasu City Website Design- What Colors Mean

Good morning readers!

Have you ever walked into an orange room and felt invigorated? What about a yoga studio with soft, earthy green walls…does it make you feel relaxed? Colors have meaning and for the next few blogs we are going to share an article explaining just what they mean, the emotions they evoke, and the style they give off. Have fun!

“Color Psychology

Colors have deep subliminal meanings that affect our thinking and rational. They have symbolic meaning that changes amongst different cultures and countries. We are faced with color choices all the time. The first crucial decision of the day usually comes in the morning when deciding what to wear. Often times we will choose our clothes based on the color of the mood we are feeling or wish to portray that day. Even more important than choice of wardrobe is the color selection for your brand or website. Color research and planning is a vital part of the design process. Before you even begin a design you must choose the appropriate colors that are effective in re enforcing the brand, message and overall tone.

Colors are a part of our pop-culture. We associate our favorite sports team by their team colors. Red Sox, White Sox, Cleveland Browns, Duke Blue Devils are among a few teams to incorporate a color into their name. Colors have become a part of our every day vocabulary; “Canary Yellow” “Carolina Blue” “John Deere Green” “Fire Engine Red.”

“An executive for a paint company received complaints from workers in a blue office that the office was too cold. When the offices were painted a warm peach, the sweaters came off even though the temperature had not changed.” – Pantone

There are the three primary colors of Red, Yellow and Blue. Then there are secondary colors of Green, Orange and Purple. Additionally, there are Tertiary colors that are combinations of the first two sets. Complimentary colors are opposite each other on the color wheel and often evoke feelings of excitement. Analogous colors are those that are close to each other on the color wheel. These give a particular feeling whether it be warm and cozy or cold and depressing.

There are many different technical aspects when it comes to working with colors. In the print world Pantone and CMYK are the color formats, while online RGB and Hexadecimal is the medium. Because of this it is important that both the web and graphic designers work closely on the color process to make sure their colors transfer smoothly from one medium to another. A color may look one way on a particular screen but when printed out it looks totally different. It is important to come up with a color palate listing all of the different color codes that will ensure a unified color scheme throughout print and web.

Red is a very strong color. It is a noticeable color that is often used on caution and warning signs. It is often associated with stop or “beware”. It’s a hot color that evokes a powerful emotion of passion, lust, sex, energy, blood and war. Red is a good color to use for accents that need to take notice over other colors. Red is often used in flags for nations, as it is a symbol of pride and strength. It is also a sporty color that many car manufactures choose to showcase their signature vehicles…”

…to be continued…

Contact us if you need a new website, inbound marketing campaign, or IT consulting. Have a nice day, and stick around for more color psychology next time!

Sep 13 / 2013
0

Articles, Inbound Marketing, Websites

Lake Havasu City Web & Graphic Design- Landing Pages, Part II

TGIF NSquared Readers, Boo yah!

Fridays are perfect for reading super cool articles about landing pages. At least we think so. See for yourself:

“What Is a Landing Page and Why Should You Care, (Part II)

…continued…

What makes a landing page most effective?

Ready to create your first landing page, or improve on a landing page you already have? Here are some of the most important elements to make sure your landing page is working hard for you:

Limit Navigation. You’ve brought your targeted traffic to a page where they can take your desired action. Don’t distract them! Limit the number of exits from your landing page so that your visitors are focused on filling out your form. A key part of this is to hide your website navigation elements on landing pages.

Deliver Value. First and foremost, if you have a valuable offer, your visitors will give up their contact information in exchange for your offer. Ask yourself if your offer is compelling to your audience and make sure that your landing pages demonstrates that value.

Enable Sharing. Tap into a huge community of your best (and free!) marketers: your audience. Add share links to your landing page to encourage your website visitors to share your content with their audiences.

Keep it Short. The longer your landing page and form, the more friction you add to the lead conversion process. Keeping your lead form short and straightforward will increase your conversion rate.

Test, Test, Test. As many best practices as you may read about online, your landing page can always use more testing and improvement. Make sure you have a landing page creation tool that allows you to create and test many different landing pages to see what works best for your business.

Are you a landing page guru? Check out some of our advanced tips and data around landing page best practices on effective calls to action and the best/worst button text (hint: don’t use “Submit”). Do you need to make any of these 10 Quick Fixes to Build Killer Landing Pages?

If you’re working hard to drive traffic to your website, don’t make the mistake of not capturing that traffic as leads.”

Sep 11 / 2013
0

Articles, Inbound Marketing, Websites

Lake Havasu City Web & Graphic Design – Landing Pages, Part I

Howdy NSquared readers!

The rest of this week is all about landing pages and why they will rock your business socks off. Check it out below!

“What Is a Landing Page and Why Should You Care, (Part I)

If you could do one thing to dramatically improve your marketing ROI today, it would be to use landing pages on your website.

What is a landing page?

Alanding page is a website page that allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead form. A good landing page will be targeted to a particular stream of traffic – say from an email campaign advertising a particular whitepaper – and, because it is targeted, and because it has an interesting offer behind a lead capture form, you will convert a higher percentage of your website visitors into leads with which you can follow up.

Why are landing pages so critical?

Too many companies send their advertising, email, or social media traffic to their homepage. This is a huge missed opportunity. When you know a stream of targeted traffic will be coming to your website, you can increase the likelihood of converting that traffic into leads by using atargeted landing page.

For example, imagine you have a Google AdWords PPC ad running for one of your best keywords. Even if you advertise how great your company is (a boring offer for any company) and someone (amazingly) clicks through on that ad, do you want to send them to your homepage? When they land on your homepage, what are they supposed to do? What do you want them to do? Once you figure out what you want the visitor to do, make it easier for them to do just that. Send them to a landing page that prompts them to complete that action. You’ll see the effectiveness of your online marketing improve dramatically…”

…to be continued…

Sep 09 / 2013
0

Articles, Blogging for Business, Inbound Marketing

Havasu Graphic Design-How to Get More Subscribers, Part III

Hi there readers!

Welcome to the final part of our series featuring Hubspot’s, “How to Convert Casual Blog Visitors Into Dedicated Subscribers“. Read on for more awesome information on turning your blog into a success!

“How to Convert Casual Blog Visitors Into Dedicated Subscribers

…continued…

4) Create a Blog Subscription Landing Page

Now that you’ve got all these great subscribe CTAs, you need somewhere to point them to. Sure, you already have your subscribe module on your blog’s homepage (at least you do now after our second tip, right?). But if you start promoting subscription to your blog via other marketing channels like social media and email (more on that later), it will start to get a bit complicated to direct visitors to that module. You’d have to say something like this:

“Go to blog.hubspot.com, and … see that little field on the top, right-hand side of the blog? Enter your email address there to subscribe.”

That isn’t exactly the optimal way to promote blog subscription, is it? And can you imagine trying to fit that into a 140-character update for Twitter? Furthermore, you’d be adding a lot of friction to the conversion process, meaning you’re guaranteed to lose out on some valuable subscribers along the way.

So what’s a more effective way to convert blog visitors into subscribers? Think … you know the answer. It’s the same way you convert website visitors into leads. That’s right — a landing page!

Create a blog subscription landing page to convert those blog discoverers into dedicated blog subscribers. This will become the heart and soul of your blog subscriber conversion efforts, allowing you to more easily promote blog subscription through your other marketing assets. So instead of that convoluted message directing people to the little module on your blog’s homepage, you can just link your CTAs directly to your landing page and say things like, “Visithttp://blog.hubspot.com/subscribe to subscribe to the HubSpot Marketing Blog!” in your social media and email promotions. So much simpler, right?

Tips for Optimizing Your Subscribe Landing Page

Optimize your subscription page using the same best practices you would for any other landing page on your website. Include descriptive headers/subheaders that capture visitors’ attention and summarizes what they’ll get, demonstrate the value of subscribing in your landing page copy, include a high-quality image, and emphasize email subscription by placing the form above the fold. You can also incorporate other elements — like social proof — to help boost conversion rates. Speaking of boosting conversion rates, don’t be afraid to do some A/B testing like you would for any other landing page (here’s a great article on landing page A/B testing to get you started).

Last but now least, if your blogging software gives you the option, offer your prospective subscribers frequency options so they can choose how much (or how little) email they want to receive for their blog notifications. (HubSpot Customers: If you’re using the new Blog COS, you can provide instant, daily, weekly, and monthly email frequency options to your subscribers.)

5) Add a Blog Opt-In Check Box to Your Landing Pages

I’m really excited to share this tip with you, because it caused us to increase our blog subscribers by 128% in just 3 months’ time. I kid you not. And all we did was add a new check box field to all our landing page forms so people could subscribe to our blog with just one click. Here’s what I mean:

If your blogging software is integrated with the rest of your marketing software, this trick is very easy to implement. At the simplest level, you need to have control over the fields on your landing page forms as well as the ability to export a list of people who opt in to your blog through these forms so you can add them to your blog subscriber list. And HubSpot users who use the new HubSpot COS (note: this will not work on HubSpot’s legacy CMS), will be able to easily start boosting their email subscribers with this little trick without any manual maintenance once it’s set up. To learn how to set it up, we have detailed instructions in this blog post. Check ’em out!

Just keep in mind that the new blog subscribers you generate through these landing page check boxes won’t impact new lead generation directly. Because these people are subscribing to your blog because they’re filling out forms for your lead gen offers, they’re already leads. However, they do have the potential to increase the readership and help you reach new audiences through mechanisms like social sharing and email forwarding. You’ll also benefit from using your free blog content as a way to nurture existing leads.

6) Do Some Email Marketing

In addition to promoting blog subscription through social media and CTAs on your website,email marketing can serve as another effective channel for driving blog subscriptions. Here are two great email marketing methods through which to promote blog subscription:

In a Dedicated Send

Promote blog subscription to different segments of contacts in your marketing database. Tailor the messaging and language you use in your dedicated send to the interests and needs of that segment. For example, you could segment your list by people who recently converted on a particular offer, and promote subscription by providing examples of articles related to topic of the offer they downloaded as a way to demonstrate the value of subscribing.

Within Lead Nurturing Workflows

Not every email within your lead nurturing workflows needs to promote a lead gen offer. Switch it up by featuring some of your big hit blog articles targeted at the types of people you’re emailing in your segmented workflows.

In what other ways can you turn your casual blog readers into dedicated subscribers? Share your tactics in the comments!

And to learn about the other critical steps to blog marketing that can help you increase the reach and ROI of your business blog, download our ebook, How to Grow & Scale Your Business Blog.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in October 2012 and has been revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.”

Contact us if you want a website or inbound marketing campaign that will rock your business’s world. Until next time, stay classy!

Sep 06 / 2013
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Articles, Blogging for Business, Inbound Marketing, Social Media

Havasu Graphic Design-How to Get More Subscribers, Part II

Howdy readers!

Welcome to Part II of our blog series featuring Hubspot’s article, “How to Convert Casual Blog Visitors Into Dedicated Subscribers“. Keep reading for more tips on having more subscribers and better CTA’s (call to actions).

“How to Convert Casual Blog Visitors Into Dedicated Subscribers

….continued…

Tips for Encouraging Subscription

One great tip for encouraging blog subscription is to use social proof to show new visitors just how popular your blog is among their peers. If you have impressive traffic or subscriber numbers, consider showcasing those. Something as simple as “Join more than 1,000 [insert persona]s who already subscribe!” can help you convert those visitors who may be on the fence.

Another smart way to incentivize blog subscription is through the use of free offers. Check out how HubSpot partner IMPACT Branding & Design does it on its blog. They provide a little something extra for new subscribers by also providing a free ebook (something usually reserved for visitors who complete a much longer form):

3) Promote Blog Subscription With Smart Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

Be more “in your face” about converting your blog visitors into subscribers by creating subscriber CTAs and placing them directly within each of your blog articles. Don’t worry — they don’t have to replace your articles’ lead-gen CTAs; just insert your blog subscription CTA as a secondary CTAdirectly below the one you’re using for lead generation (like we’ve done at the bottom of this very post!). Here’s what I mean:

If you’re worried about it impacting the clickthrough rate (CTR) on your lead-gen CTA, just keep a close eye on your CTA analytics. When we implemented this on the HubSpot blog, we didn’t notice any dip in CTR on our lead-gen CTAs, but you should always test for yourself.

And Make Them Smart!

Here’s the thing: If a visitor is already subscribed to your blog, it doesn’t really make sense to continue displaying your subscribe CTAs to them, now does it? These people are already subscribed, and it’s a much better, more contextual use of your blog’s real estate to show off that lead gen CTA front and center — by itself. So how do you make sure you’re only showing your subscribe CTAs to visitors who aren’t yet subscribed? Technology, my friends … technology. I like to call these CTAs “magic CTAs,” because sometimes they’re invisible 🙂

To create these “magic” CTAs, you are, however, at the mercy of your software. They’re powered by dynamic content, so you’ll need marketing software with this type of functionality.(Note: HubSpot customers can use a combination of the new HubSpot Blog COS and Smart CTAs to create these. You can find instructions about how to set them up in this blog post.)

Where appropriate, use your blog subscription CTAs on other pages of your website as well to give visitors a low-commitment conversion alternative. You might also consider adding your blog subscription CTAs to other Smart CTA groups to allow you to automatically customize which CTAs get shown to users in different lifecycle stages or based on specific list criteria.

…to be continued…

Contact us if you need a website, or the website you have needs some work and a blog. Have a great day, and stick around for Part II of How to Get More Subscribers. Tootledoo, and have a great weekend!

Sep 05 / 2013
0

Articles, Blogging for Business, Social Media

Havasu Graphic Design-How to Get More Subscribers, Part I

Good morning NSquared readers!

Do you have a blog?

If so, chances are you want people to read it, right? Well Hubspot posted a fantastic article, “How to Concert Casual Blog Visitors into Dedicated Subscribers“. Check out Part I below:

“How to Convert Casual Blog Visitors Into Dedicated Subscribers

You probably know all too well by now that content creation is a very necessary function of successful inbound marketing. And for the inbound marketers who embrace that, abusiness blog is one of the most reliable and effective platforms for publishing much of the content they create.

But if you’ve been consistently blogging for a while, you probably have all the business blogging basics down pat. So wouldn’t it be great if you could take your blogging to the nextlevel, scaling the impact of your blog so it makes an even bigger, better, and more powerful dent in your marketing results?

Enter the concept of ‘blog marketing,’ which refers not to using a blog to market your business, but instead to implementing a marketing strategy to grow and scale the impact of your blog. In other words, marketing for your blog. There are three critical steps to blog marketing: 1) getting your blog discovered by new visitors, 2) converting those visitors into dedicated subscribers, and 3) leveraging your blog evangelists to share your content and attract brand new audiences.

So let’s say you’ve worked through step number 1, and you’ve got a good amount of blog traffic flowing. How can you get those folks to stick around and keep coming back so they become avid readers and fans of your blog content? With step number 2: by converting those visitors into subscribers! In this article, we’ll give you some great tips for turning those casual visitors into valuable, dedicated blog subscribers.

1) Blog Frequently (and Make Sure It’s High Quality)

First things first: frequency matters. How can you expect visitors to subscribe to your content if you rarely or infrequently publish anything for them to come back to? You wouldn’t exactly be making the strongest case for subscription. If you really want to scale your blog, you need to make a commitment to boosting your blogging frequency. According to an internal study of HubSpot customers, businesses that blog more than once per week add new blog subscribers at twice the rate of businesses that blog just once per month.

Yes, frequency matters — so work your way up. If you’re currently blogging once a month, work your way up to once a week. If you blog once a week, work your way up to a few times a week. Truthfully, the most successful blogs publish content daily — or multiple times a day.

Keep in mind, however, that a boost in frequency can’t come with a decrease in quality. Your new visitors won’t be enticed to subscribe if they don’t find your content to be worthy of their attention. And with all the crappy content out there, you can’t afford mediocrity if you want to win over those new visitors. For more on creating high-quality content, here’s how to tell if your content is actually valuable, and here are eight instant ways to improve your content’s quality if it’s not.

2) Encourage Blog Subscription (Particularly Email)

If you want people to subscribe, encourage blog subscription! Sounds simple right? But it’s amazing how often I have to hunt through a blog’s homepage to find where in the heck to subscribe. Make it easy for visitors to subscribe — put your subscribe module above the fold on your sidebar, and display it prominently.

Also notice how I mentioned you should emphasize email subscription. Remember, there are two ways your visitors can subscribe to your blog — via RSS, and via email. Both are valuable, but email subscription can have a much bigger impact than RSS subscription. Email boosts traffic to your blog, since subscribers get emailed whenever new content gets published (compared to RSS, which subscribers have to manually check on their own).

In fact, 14% of our monthly traffic to the HubSpot blog comes from email. And to tie this all back to the importance of blogging frequency, in that same study of HubSpot customers we mentioned earlier, we learned that businesses that blog more than once per week generate 9x more blog email traffic than businesses that blog just once per month. Convinced that you should put more of an effort into generating email subscribers yet?”

Contact us if you need a website, inbound marketing campaign, or IT consulting. Stay tuned for part II where we share more tips on boosting your subscribers and talk about CTA’s (call to actions).

Sep 03 / 2013
0

Graphic Design

Lake Havasu City Websites: Superb Typography

Good morning NSquared readers!

Can words be art? Heck yeah! Check out, 30 Superb Examples of Typography, below. We are only featuring a handful of the examples, so if you want to see all of them just click the article link above. Let the typographic eye candy begin.

“30 Superb Examples Of Typography In Graphic Design

Write a Bike

Yogurt

Terrestrial Locomotive

Highway to nowhere

Softees

Aug 31 / 2013
0

Articles, Inbound Marketing, Websites

Have a Rockin Lake Havasu City Website, Part IV

Good morning readers! Boo yah, it’s Saturday!

Welcome to the very last article featuring Hubspot’s cache of well-done homepages. Keep reading to see the rest of these easy to navigate, easy on the eyes pages.

“16 Brands That Totally Nailed Their Homepage Designs

…continued….

12) New Breed

New Breed’s website effectively balances its different buckets of content and presents it all in a well-organized, easily-digestible page.

13) SilkTricky

Another example of content organized into visual tiles is SilkTricky. Notice the use of a carrot visual element (the white triangle in the text boxes) to unobtrusively connect the site’s text and visuals for the reader.

14) Function Point

Function Point’s website maintains a consistent look and feel across all of its design elements. The site’s illustration, style, and choice of colors also help enhance the design and build a visual hierarchy.

15) Woodwork

Despite the potentially overwhelming visuals on this page, clear navigation and layout (shown here) ensures that the user isn’t overwhelmed.

16) Quarter Rest Studios

This homepage is essentially one large slideshow paired with a simple top navigation. It gives the visitor a limited but useful set of options — presumably ideal for the magazine’s visual-based target market.

”

Weren’t these just the coolest ever? Does your business need a website with a homepage that will keep potential clients browsing? Give us a holler! And while you’re at it, ask about our current specials on inbound marketing campaigns and websites. Have a wonderful, safe, and stylish weekend.

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