End-of-Year Special
Get a SPECIAL DISCOUNT by December 31, 2010
As the year 2010 ends, I am offering a very special discount: I will create and build your NEW WEBSITE or fix your current for a very low special price only through 12/31/2010.
See the many examples below of websites that I have built for other people. I can build your website, too, at an incredibly low price.
You must make full payment online by 12/31/2010 because this offer will not be available to you at all in 2011. No exceptions.
2010 End-of-Year Special
Woody’s Website SPECIAL = $200 total price
If you do not want my $200 special, please consider downloading my eBook WEB SECRET POWERS to learn how you can do this yourself.
Please email me with your questions about this end-of-year 2010 special deal: woodygoulart@gmail.com
Below, I invite you to glance at numerous examples of websites that I have built for others. These examples will give you a very clear picture of the kind of website that you, too, can have when you turn to me to help you before 12/31/2010:
- If you own a small business, you should see the website that I built for a shopping center, The Shops at Seascape Village in Northern California. Small businesses deserve the special attention and below market prices that I consistently provide!
- I repaired and updated the 1990s style website for Stevton Consulting in Maryland. The outcome is that now, executive coach Mike Peduto has a contemporary site that will enable him to compete professionally in competitive marketplace. Ask Mike to tell you how my helping him with this website made a serious difference in his professional life.
- Jeannie O’Donnell in Washington, DC turned to me to advise her on effective online communication strategies and tactics. The result is her new online presentation at EatLikeJeannie.com to give her state-of-the-art outreach capabilities to her target market.
- When Oregon Trail Mobile Estates in Nebraska needed a website to promote their reopening, I provided all the help they needed. A new website was created for this small business, including original digital art to help promote the RV and mobile home park.
- Not long ago, Ned Lundquist was thinking about using the Internet to promote his unique job-seeker help called Ned’s Job of the Week. Initially, Ned started out using Internet email to create and build a network of people interested in weekly updates about the many available job openings nationwide. I convinced Ned to augment his use of email with his own Web site. Then, I personally helped Ned build his site. Because of my coaching and guidance, Ned learned the benefits of having his own site; where to host it; how to organize his site content; how to maintain and update his site; how to expand to using social media sites; and, how to promote his site and make money from advertising.
- I also helped Stagnaro Strategic Marketing in the San Francisco Bay Area launch their own blog and provided coaching and guidance to start them on their way to using current online marketing/advertising methods.
- Another example: Washington, DC chef Hagai Mesilati and food enthusiast Jay Doeden followed my coaching and guidance to discover the best ways to get established online with their own site to market their boutique catering services and brand. As a direct result, Palette Dome Cuisine as a business learned the benefits of having their own branded site; where to host it; how to organize site content; how to maintain and update the site; how to expand to using social media capabilities on the site; and, how to promote the brand using the site.
No matter how small or large a business or nonprofit you may represent, I am here to help you before 2010 ends. This $200 price will NOT be available to you during calendar year 2011. No exceptions.
Please email me with your questions about this end-of-year 2010 special deal: woodygoulart@gmail.com
Buy The Right Shoes For Blogging
Without much effort, anyone can easily find false promises online. I am amused—sometimes I laugh out loud—when I see advice online about jumping into social media right now as the one-size-fits-all solution to marketing yourself or your organization or products and services. While I continue laughing at the ridiculousness of such advice about getting started using social media today, let me stop and ask you a question: Do you know how to buy the right shoes for blogging?
I previously ran every day. So, I guess I can claim to know a few things about running shoes. I do know that buying the correct shoes for running or for any other athletic activity can mean the difference between physical injury and physical health. Choose to ignore this wisdom at your own peril.
As someone who has built websites for others since the 1990s, I can claim to know a few things about marketing using the Internet. And, it may surprise you to learn that I see a relationship between buying shoes for running and buying into the current craze about getting into social media.
Here’s the truth: You would never believe any person who told you that all you need to attain physical health is to buy the latest running shoes. Buying running shoes only gives you the ability to run while avoiding physical injury to your feet, your legs, and your entire body. But, the elusive reality is: You can buy the most expensive running shoes, yet the results that you can get from using those expensive running shoes depend more on what’s in your brain than what’s on your feet.
The same is true about the relationship between succeeding in marketing using the Internet and your use of social media, blogging, microblogging, and all the other wonderful things that you can do using the Web these days.
You could choose to believe all that hype online today and you could decide to start using Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr or WordPress or fill-in-the-blank this very afternoon. All of those are merely tools to help you interact with other people. The most important word in that sentence is the sixth word—tools.
You may have heard that wise old say about using the right tool for the job. If you are like me and at one time or another you may have tried to remove a nail tightly inserted into wood by using a pair of needle nose pliers, well, you know what I mean here.
Buying running shoes will not make you successful at running. Buying into social media, blogging, microblogging and whatever will not make you successful at using the Internet for marketing. That simple truth is right in front of most peoples’ eyes today. Ignoring that simple truth is so easy to do because of the sexy promises being made about the hottest new social media channels.
Because I understand that simple truth, I can save you a lot of money and wasted time. I can advise you about how to use the right tool for the job when the job is using the Internet for marketing.
A Great Writer, Ted Sorensen
Today, October 31, 2010, saw the passing of a great writer from the United States, Ted Sorensen. Throughout the 82 years that this man from Nebraska lived and worked, he contributed in significant and often historic ways to the craft of writing in the 20th century in the United States.
My professional life drew inspiration from the writer that Ted Sorensen was. Although I never met him, I find that I am saddened today that he is gone.
There will be many words written about Ted Sorensen by others great and famous. I only want to pay my sincere respects today to his family, and to urge other writers to remember this man and to study how he wrote.
I would select one especially important work of his as a starting point for such remembrances and studies of Ted Sorensen:
He made crucial contributions to the crafting of the 1961 inauguration speech by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. That work—considered one of the greatest presidential inauguration speeches in American history—contained simple, yet commandingly powerful words that floated like magic into the air on that cold January day in Washington, DC. So it was that words from a speech were elevated in importance due to their clarity combined with pinpointed accuracy. So it was that we saw well chosen and skillfully delivered words morph into an iconic signpost for the Kennedy presidency and that long ago era of youthful optimism:
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
The Thrill and The Agony of PowerPoint
We all know the ancient wisdom that a picture is worth a thousand words. But, is there value in a picture of a thousand words? I am not the first to pose this question in the context of the use of Microsoft’s PowerPoint software.
Before business became as Web-centric as we now know it to be today, first came the late 1980s and PowerPoint. Since then, PowerPoint has revolutionized how business presentations are made. As the Paul McCartney lyric has taught us, “There is good and bad in everyone,” and this is certainly also true of PowerPoint.
The good traits are well known to everyone who relies upon PowerPoint: This amazing presentation software enables users to create image-based pages (slides) that easily can be shared by someone using a computer, projector and a screen. PowerPoint presentations also can be printed on paper and handed out. It also is very common to email a PowerPoint presentation to recipients so that they can view it on their own computer and print it if they so choose. These attributes of PowerPoint make it very popular in business, especially.
I believe that there are not necessarily accompanying bad traits to PowerPoint, itself. I have learned from professional experience, however, that bad things frequently can happen stemming from the misuse of PowerPoint. This combination of good and bad is a simultaneous outcome that delivers both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
PowerPoint came to be before the widespread use of the Internet for business and before Web browsers. So, it is tempting to think of this powerful presentation software that came to be in the offline environment as being separate and different from the online experience.
But, in reality, there are core similarities between Web pages and PowerPoint pages: Both can present words in text form along with images on pages, and both can give an audience audio and video content that easily can be replayed by the user at their convenience.
These capabilities are at the heart of the matter of why bad things can happen to good people who use PowerPoint. The most common negative outcome when using PowerPoint (and also Web pages) is what happens whenever the writer is not sufficiently skilled or talented.
The problem is not with Microsoft or with PowerPoint. The problems begin with any person who uses PowerPoint incorrectly. It turns out that not knowing how to write and produce successful PowerPoint presentations can create very serious business problems.
The most common business problem is PowerPoint presentations that contain pages upon pages of too many words. There can also be too many images placed into PowerPoint pages. The purpose of PowerPoint is to enable the sharing of visually powerful presentations. So, why oh why is it so prevalent that people put too much information into PowerPoint pages?
We have all seen PowerPoint presentations that run 20 or 30 or more pages. We have all attended presentations in meetings where the speaker will actually say, “I apologize to those of you in the back who cannot read all the words on this page.”
Verbally saying something does not change the audience experience. In fact, as soon as the presenter says something about what is wrong with the PowerPoint presentation’s text or images, the audience immediately will focus upon those deficiencies.
More to the point, there should never be any need whatsoever to apologize aloud to anyone in the audience during a PowerPoint presentation. The time to think about the audience and the viewing experience is during the writing and creation of PowerPoint presentations.
The need is very simple: If everyone in the intended audience cannot easily and quickly read all the words and see all the images on the page so that each person processes the intended meaning or messages on the page, then there is a fatal flaw built in to that PowerPoint page.
Such fatally flawed PowerPoint pages should never be presented in public. The problem is compounded by those who print and hand out PowerPoint presentations with too many words and images on too many pages. An unforgivable outcome is if someone emails you their PowerPoint presentation that is such a large file it clogs up and slows down how your email inbox performs.
These traits related to excess are easily preventable. The solution is only to trust people who have skills and talents in writing and creating PowerPoint to do this important work. Just because PowerPoint is relatively easy to use does not mean that everyone should use it in the business world.
Contact me if you want professional assistance in creating PowerPoint presentations or Web presentations and I will enable your own thrill of winning over your target audience while sparing you the agony of failure.
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