This is not a blog, this is just where Desi puts pieces of advice she has provided and feels others might also benefit from. You can browse the advice Desi’s given in the past here, or ask a new question any old time you want by requesting her consulting time.

• April 9, 2012 : GVING – New Customer Loyalty Tool for Local Businesses with Walk in Traffic
  

  Whether or not you live in a Major metropolis, you can now benefit from the tools created for social apps and iphones to help draw new customers in. Your customer loyalty program can now operate in the 21st century. https://gving.com/ is a new service that allows you to create an customer loyalty program of your own creation that immediately integrates. Your servers learn a pin code instead of stamping a card, and boom, that's it. You're suddenly ahead of your competition locally for everyone with smart phones. If you take walk-in traffic, why would you NOT do this? Repeat business is the lifeblood of a successful storefront, after all. Here is their schpeel video...

  
  
• February 16, 2012 : A Dozen Ways to Improve your YouTube and Video Rankings
  

  A client asked me today about how to SEO a YouTube video around a term and for best helping your website's placement in search, plus some additional advice for how to dominate YouTube in general. Here's what I said. Title your CHANNEL something related to your HIGHEST LEVEL keyword - the one that every page on your site relates to.Desi Matlock  Have your SEO review the CHANNEL's description and fields in general. Lacking that, make sure your descriptions at the CHANNEL and VIDEO level are engaging, keyword-rich and actually apply to the videos in the channel. Make sure that your CHANNEL description includes a like to your website's homepage. Title your VIDEO with a phrase that contains a variation on your keyword -- you can be loosely repetitive and odd in YouTube titles as long as you don't make it unreadable by humans.  Similar keywords can be used in tandem here so long as you don't sound "spammy". Add an annotation to the VIDEO that is the exact keyword you most want to show up in search for, applied to the part of the video it most applies to. (if you can't figure out where it actually might apply, you need to go back to square zero and make a video that really DOES relate to that keyword instead of trying to "fudge" it.)  By annotation is meant one of those "speech bubble" things. Add another "speech bubble" annotation toward the end of the video with a helpful hint of some kind, that just
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• February 3, 2012 : Need Guinea Pigs for WordPress to Facebook connectivity with EMAIL collection
  

  I need guinea pigs for connecting a wordpress blog through a plugin and an app to a service that will not only help you develop facebook followers but also (drumroll please) collect email addresses for you to use in mailings. If you have aWeber, it will be automatic, otherwise you'll get a list of emails every so often that you can add to your email system of your choice. Please let me know if you're interested in being a guinea pig. If you're not interested, at least pass it on - let others know. Someone will be very interested. I'm only accepting five people as guinea pigs.    

  
  
• January 25, 2012 : Email Open Rates – Quick Study
  

  I was recently asked to review best practices for open rates and provide that research to a client.  I figured we could all benefit from what I found out by studying not only historical data for high-traffic clients but online research as well. 1. What Device are they opening the email with? Many people now get their email on their phone. If they tried to open one of the emails from us on their phone, didn't like the way it displays, they might not continue to open other emails from us in the future, set them aside to open later on when they're at a computer, and then forget. Check many devices to see how your emails display in the minimal space provided for on iphones, tablets and android devices. 2. What Email Address does the email appear to be coming from? You actually have TWO pieces of information that you present whenever you send an email - the subject line and the email address. People more often open email that appears to be from a person, such as [email protected], over emails that appear to be from a company-positioned email address, such as [email protected] or another impersonal address. You're "realer" with a name than a position. 3. What Time of Day is it? Contrary to a great deal of opinion, morning is the worst time for someone to find your email in their box. Any time that means that your email won't be seen until 8-9 the next day also reached abysmal open rates compared with a time where you're the only email in their
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• January 19, 2012 : Going Mobile – Google is pushing you to do it…
  

  Google is urging people to make their sites accessible from mobile devices and to optimize around mobile. This makes sense for a lot of reasons - firstly people often browse to your map, read your promotional emails, or access your website only on their phones. I've seen a huge surge in the last six months on the QUALITY traffic arriving to my heavy traffic PPC campaigns from search market - they've become serious and dedicated searchers, not the idle few they once appeared to be. Here is Google's page on going mobile-  a whole site around the "mobile initiative"... sounds pretty serious, no? How to 'GoMo' - AKA 'Go Mobile' It's been slow and glitchy for me so far... but it's only been up for a very short time.... let's cut them a little slack and check back.   It's sure to be a great resource for helping the average business owner convert to a mobile friendly web presence. For now, get the following pages in order: your places page, your bing local, yahoo local, get your social campaigns linked up with that, get your 'click to call' ads working, and start thinking about how to make your website display better in a smaller piece of visual real estate. We're back to smaller screens (kind of) but at least we can create a different style of site for those users than the people who arrive on their 50 inch plasma.

  
  
• January 17, 2012 : Authenticity
  

  If you can fake it, you've got it made... Just kidding. In reality, it is the key to a good social media campaign. If you want to be popular in social media, find your MESSAGE, find a campaign that links that message to your product, and put your authentic voice behind it. Of course, first you need to make certain that your website, your social media accounts and your blog are all working together in perfect harmony.  That is where a good web designer can make your life easier.

  
  
• January 16, 2012 : Wombat Zone
  

  I love doing the whole webmaster thing. Does anyone else remember when your company spellchecker used to correct the word "webmaster" to "wombats" if you weren't careful? Or have I been doing this whole internet thing too long? I remember when the amazing buzz words were things like "file sharing" and "get answers in minutes, not days" and "Surf the World Wide Web to Find That Recipe Right Away". When AOL was a force to be reckoned with and when you hung out in chat rooms instead of chatting in hangouts. I remember when asterisks only pointed out fine print. When LOL was just the first three letters in lollipop. Spell checker has been replaced by autocorrect. And we all know how amazingly much better that is now. Or not. *sigh* I still don't really know that I'm ever going to completely accept some of the codes for degrees of laughter, because I know I for one don't roll on the floor that often, but I do know that I'm totally down with the happiness, and I know I still love the webmaster thing. The landscape changed completely, everyone who laughed at us back then has climbed on board, and brought their reluctant mothers and even five year old kid sisters. Doesn't matter. I'm still here, doing what I do, and I still love being a wombat.

  
  
• January 13, 2012 : Protected: How does my computer connect to another computer really?
  

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• September 1, 2011 : What a marketing consultant really needs to know to help you with Adwords…
  

  Here is a list of questions I just sent to a client who asked me to help him with Adwords. It's pretty standard that these are my questions... I've anonymized a little of this, but I think some of you may read this over and consider whether you've told YOUR marketing professional about all of this. If not, get on it. It can only improve your relationship with them and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. Before I create a new account for you, do you already have an active account with Google Adwords? What is your target market exactly? Do you have any market research that I should see? Who is absolutely never your target market? How are your prospects finding you right now? What action are you hoping your interested first-time visitors will do? What is the eventual outcome of that if everything goes according to plan? Does your website currently make that easy? What are your different offerings? Do you have unique pages on your website for each of these offerings, and unique ways to sign up for them individually? How do you compare to your major competitors? What sets you apart from your competition? Do you already have any marketing tools either online or offline to communicate these differences? Do you presently make it easy to compare side by side? How have your marketing campaigns online gone? Any pitfalls or lessons learned? ----- There are so many next steps, and so much more data I should know, but these are a good start to making sure your money gets
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• August 31, 2011 : One space or two spaces between sentences?
  

  It's not completely one or the other, as many say. And it goes back to whether the font is fixed-width or proportional. Contrary to the general belief, there are still a few good uses for fixed-width (also known as monospace) fonts. Software code is usually viewed as monospace.  And some screenwriters and novelists use fixed-width fonts intentionally. Writers and coders use fixed width for the same exact reason. So they can get a proper character counts and page counts come out exact. Basically, whenever you're using a fixed-width font, using double spaces between sentences to improve readability is your choice and may sometimes be required by the people you're creating that text for. This supposed rule got started because old typewriters were fixed-width and many editors required two spaces between sentences in all writing. But that is no longer the case. There is no reason to double space your sentences on any modern typewriter or computer unless you're intentionally using a fixed-width font. Early typographers must have been rolling over in their graves when the typewriter was wasting so much space between letters. Wasting space on pages was a sin when paper and vellum were such a precious commodity. This page maybe ought to have two spaces between sentences. But it doesn't. It's harder to read his descriptive text than it ought to be, in my opinion. But that was his choice. When using a proportional font — regardless of your personal preferences — use only a single space. Any social usage of typing will only require one space. Trivia:
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