The answer comes from a cool site called TinEye. TinEye is known as a “reverse image search” engine. In short, that means that you can give it a link to an image, and it will find where that image has been used elsewhere.

Let’s show it off!

This is an image that we made way back in May 2009 to correspond with our article “Our Plumbers, 10% Steroid Free.”

The Image:

And here are TinEye’s results for the image:

These sites are all using the image.

In looking a bit deeper, we can see that all four of these sites are simply hotlinking our image (linking directly to our image), without any attribution. In other words, they’re stealing our bandwidth (which is admittedly cheap these days) but not telling anyone who made the image. The fourth result appears to just be a simple forum, and we’ll let them slide.

This is a great time for us to call out the two images we took 3 minutes to combine in Photoshop to make this picture in the first place:

• Billboard image: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1089869 by artist asifthebes
• Clown: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/32081 by artist glo

Obviously I can hardly call this image our own, as we simply combined two free use images and added a tag line over them, but this technique is great for finding photos that you took yourself, or designs that you created from the ground up.

TinEye isn’t the only place to go to track down your images, and Google has recently gotten into the game with their hugely popular Images search. To use it, just save the image in question to your computer, go to http://www.google.com/imghp and drag the image over the text box on the page. You’ll see this:

And the results:

Interestingly, the three images it found are all ones that TinEye didn’t catch. This illustrates the benefit of going through both channels when trying to track down an image.

What do you do when you found an image that you want to have removed? Try http://www.dmca.com/takedowns.aspx for a start, or send the site a letter directly informing them of the infringement.

Stay friendly, you never know where they found the image or what they knew about their ability to use it on their own site. There’s a lot of conflicting information online, and the chances are high that this was just an innocent mistake on their part!

In virtually all cases, the primary goals of your website should be to:

1. Establish your position as a trusted expert and resource.
   Unless you’ve made your brand by selling the lowest end junk that you can find, you need to prove your knowledge and expertise through your website. It doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber, an attorney, a charitable organization, or someone who sells car parts. No one will (should) buy from someone that they don’t trust.
2. Provide what your customers need to make an informed decision.
   If all your website says is how great and how trustworthy you are, then it’s all but useless. Your site needs to be about the customer, their needs and wants, and how your product or service helps to solve those for them. Information about how satisfied your customers are is great and very important, but it’s not a substitute for providing knowledge about your product or service.
3. Make it easy for customers to contact you or buy when they are ready.
   If your contact information is hard to find or non-existent, then you might as well not have a website. There are far too many alternatives just a Google search away for people to waste their time trying to get in touch with you. Make it very easy, but don’t shove it in their face. Phone number to the top right, Contact Us form and a well-formed Live Chat if desired.
4. Make it very easy for customers to continue doing business with you.
   You’ve proven the value of your product or service, you’ve gotten the order/e-mail/call and you have a new customer. Fantastic! Now what are you doing to keep them happy, keep them coming back and make it easy for them to continue doing business with you? Consider e-mail newsletters that talk about new benefits for your customers, new products or services, and include articles that would be valuable to them. If your e-mail blast just talks about your products and how great you are, don’t bother sending them out.

For help with your online marketing, website design or search engine and social media efforts, give us a call at 800.203.8139, or e-mail us.

It’s very well presented, without a lot of fluff or jargon, but we have to wonder how many people are going to make Facebook their home page? This is a major power play aimed squarely at Google, which has been the default home page for just about everyone for years.

We would love to see the statistics on how much bookmarking jumps as a result of this little box notification!

1. Follow back your legitimate followers.
   Unless you are a major celebrity, it is considered good manners to follow back, and it helps your followers to feel that they are important to you.
2. Respond to people who have re-tweeted your messages or mentioned you on Twitter.
   It just takes a minute to thank someone for taking the time to mention you or share a post. Not only will they be more likely to retweet messages of yours again in the future, you are letting them know that you value their input.
3. If someone says something positive on Twitter about your business, retweet it from your account.
   It will benefit you both greatly.
4. Make sure that any time you update Facebook, Twitter is also updated and vice versa.
   We would suggest linking the two accounts so that Facebook automatically updates Twitter for you, but this can sometimes have drawbacks. Primarily, if you write a post longer than 140 characters in Facebook, Twitter will clip it and add an ugly link to read more at the end. Better to keep these updated individually with a similar message to ensure that this does not happen, or conversely to link and update your Facebook status via Twitter (rather than the other way around).
5. Don’t forget about Twitter.
   It’s easy to put it off due to other obligations, but a lingering Twitter account does nothing for anyone. Try to get in quick posts whenever possible, even if these are simply short comments and links to articles you’ve found while browsing RSS feeds on your iPhone.

Still not seeing your follower count increasing? Get in touch with us, we can help.

Tweet on!

I was driving down the road a few days ago, when I passed a sign that made me stop (not literally of course) and think. It read something like this:

“Our plumbers, 100% steroid free.”

What???? Why would anyone care that a plumber doesn’t use steroids? Does it affect job performance? How does this have any bearing on anything?

Then I realized, the ad was simply designed to catch my eye and to keep me thinking about it. Well, it succeeded at that, but it failed in it’s ultimate goal – as I spent so much time wondering how steroid use impacts plumbing that I have no idea which plumbing company was the advertiser.

I see similar ads all over the place. I see more and more radical headlines, company names and colors than ever before. Usually, the “attention getter” makes literally no sense whatsoever (like the plumbing ad), and is simply created in a desperate attempt to get noticed.

I say, take an extra hour of brainstorming to uncover what stands out and would interest people about your company, instead of just throwing out whatever you think will get people to look. I will notice something out of place on an ad (until it’s so common that it gets ignored too), but I won’t be impressed that a company spent it’s ad budget to tell me something nonsensical.

What if the plumbing company had instead said “Our plumbers wear belts,” accompanied by a picture of a plumber leaning over a sink and not flashing himself at the drivers passing by the sign?

Instead of a minute spent wondering why plumbers would use steroids in the first place, I’d spend 10 seconds smiling about the companies’ sense of humor. Their ability to poke fun at one of the biggest stereotypes in their industry (and consequently themselves) would go a lot further for me than some ill-planned ad simply designed to catch my attention.

And in the end, which is more effective? Is it the minute spent thinking not about your company, but an ad that doesn’t make sense? Or is it the 10 seconds spent reflecting on a humorous ad, one that gives the viewer a shot at also remembering the name of the company, instead of just the ad?

I want a company with a sense of humor, not one that deliberately makes no sense in an effort to get my attention.

Anyone else with me on this one? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

The people who come out of this recession, just like any other, stronger and better will be the ones who take this time to make their business better. In the web world, that means focusing on ensuring that your site’s content is readable, friendly and conveys the message you would like to get across. It means removing the pictures of the Christmas party from three years ago from the “Latest News” section on your site (how many people reading this hear me all too well on that one?), and it means updating your list of products and services to purge those that you no longer do, and to emphasize the ones that you have since added. If you don’t have a blog, now would be a great time to start one, but only if you are willing to dedicate yourself, and your company resources to at least one meaningful article per week. This doesn’t mean a blatant advertisement for how much better you are than the other guys down the street, it means actually writing something that people will enjoy reading, and that will provide them with solid benefit.

Do these things now, and you will reap the benefits down the road.