Original Site:

New Site:

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!

Stay “tuned,” (get it? car shop humor) more is on the way soon!

Visit the new First Fidelity website, or just view the “before and after” below!

Before-

After-

Check it out here! http://www.optimalhearing.com

Before:
After:

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.

Genesis Shelter is an Atlanta-based shelter for homeless infants and their families that helps them to grow and develop in nurturing and healthy surroundings.

Check them out at http://www.genesisanewlife.org!

Here is a view of the new site:

And here is the original site: