As spring weather starts to move in, a lot of us will turn our thoughts to green grass, warmer temperatures, and maybe getting outside on the evenings and weekends. But if you can manage to focus a little bit of your time and energy on online marketing as the warmer days come, you might be surprised at how much you can accomplish while the rest of the world isn’t paying attention — and how much easier your summer months will feel with the hard work out of the way.

Here is a quick reminder of four areas where you might think about tuning up your business website this spring:

Refresh your search engine optimization plan. If you’re not showing up on one of the top few spots on Google or Yahoo for your most important keywords, then it’s very likely costing you a lot of money. Now is a great time to think about optimizing your site for the future.

Gather some steam on your social media profiles. More followers, better profiles, and frequent updates all make it easier to use sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to secure new customers. Make it your goal this spring to add one or two new contacts every day.

Add more online videos to your company’s site. Online videos don’t just help you sell more, but also create stronger brand awareness, decrease customer-service expenses, and improve traffic to your site. Why not take advantage of the new season by shooting a few high-quality clips?

Plan for some new web content. This is often the part of the year where all the grand plans and ideas people had at New Year’s start to lose some of the momentum. Take advantage of the warmer weather and give yourself a mental break, but also assess how you doing towards reaching your long-term goals and make a firm plan to get back on track if you need to do.

Want to start making your company more competitive online this spring? Find out how eKzact Web Design has helped so many other businesses in and around Calgary to meet their bottom-line goals.

As Christmas approached like a high speed train, I thought it would be a good time to send a note out to our clients.  A lot of things have happened in the past several months. It was high time to tell the clients.

While drafting our e-zine, I came up with several objectives for our business in 2008.  They have now been jotted down as our business “New Year Resolutions”.

Our business turned 3 years old.  In terms of a business, there is a lot of maturing that is done in the first few years.  Talking to Tom Malin of Party Machine yesterday, we were chatting about running a business.  Tom is considering a business blog.  We agreed that there are very few business owners that don’t have something to share in terms of “learning”.  One of our resolutions for 2008 is to continue to encourage our clients, the members of my peer group, and the members of our networking groups, to share their experience.  I am going to work closely with one of my mentors, Stuart Crawford, to encourage business owners to start a blog.

We are growing… Sandy Thoen has joined us as an Internet Consultant.  Sandy is a graduate of the U of C Web Design & Development program.  Sandy has already brought several high profile clients to eKzact, including Brewers Distributor.  David Fradette joined us in September as project coordinator. David’s role is to ensure we turn-out customer requests in a timely manner. Our design/development team also continues to grow. We add design and programming resources as needed to keep up with demand. Moving into 2008 we will continue to grow.  We have a very clear sales objective for 2008 and have developed plans to acheive these goals.

On a side note…We moved…

eKzact Solutions has moved. Our phone numbers have not changed.  The e-newsletter to the clients was just sent, in order to get our new address out to them.  Mail sent 10 minutes ago – 15% opened, 3 bounced, 4 visits to our website… I love how measurable and email campaign can be.  I certainly do not get stats like this from the Yellow pages.  I’ll check the campaign results again tomorrow, and will know exactly how many people have read my note.  I’ll also look at the analytics for eKzact.com to see an increase in unique visitors as a direct result of the newsletter.

We have updated our clients on a number of plans that we have for the new year.  I’m not going to write about each of the programs we are introducing in this blog entry – but stay tuned.  We have a series of objectives for marketing to our own clients in 2008.  This is one of our “New Year Resolutions”… market to our own clients. This growing group of valuable supporters is often overlooked by business owners. 

What are your business resolutions for 2008?  Give yourself some clear objective goals, make them measureable, and then test them out.  You just may be surprised at the results.

All the best to you for the Christmas Season and I wish you all continued success for 2008

David A. West