Onsharp

Fargo Moorhead West Fargo Chamber of Commerce presented the 2012 ChamberChoice Small Business of the Year award to Onsharp, May 17^th. The FMWF Chamber announced the winners during the ChamberChoice Awards Luncheon at the Holiday Inn of Fargo.

Each year, the Fargo Moorhead West Fargo Chamber of Commerce selects three finalists from the following categories: Small Business of the Year, Business of the Year, Small-Not-For-Profit of the Year, Not-For-Profit of the Year, Young Professionals Best Place to Work and Entrepreneur of the Year. There were a record-breaking number of nominees for the awards and 42 of the nominees completed applications for the honors.

The ChamberChoice finalists are chosen by a panel of independent judges from the regional business community, who evaluated accomplishments in the areas of business growth, innovation, creativity, community involvement and unique achievements relating to a specific business or industry. -Fargo Moorhead West Fargo Chamber of Commerce.

This was the second consecutive year that Onsharp has been nominated for the honor.  "On behalf of everyone at Onsharp, I'd like to thank the Chamber for selecting us as this year's Small Business of the Year. We are very fortunate to have a hard-working and caring team of individuals who are passionate in their service to our clients and our community. I am very proud of our team's accomplishments and they accomplishments and they are very deserving of this recognition," says President, Joe Sandin.  

There is more information about the ChamberChoice Awards program online at www.FMWFChamber.com/chamberchoice. 

If the number of viewers visiting your websites is still low, chances are high that you are not marketing it enough. This problem can be addressed through innovative search engine marketing solutions. This involves promoting your website by increasing its visibility in search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo Search. Search engine marketing solutions  include search engine optimization as well as the  placement of ads on other websites to increase incoming visitor traffic to your website. If you are looking for an in-depth analysis of search engine marketing solutions that work, read below.

Keyword Analysis and Research

The use of keywords is one of the most effective yet underrated search engine marketing solutions. The keyword phrase-that is the term that the potential visitor types into the search engine when looking for something- can determine the success or failure of your search engine marketing strategy. Website domains no longer influence visitor traffic. Instead, it is proper keyword research that does the trick. This is because it shows you the related keywords that are popular at the moment. This knowledge helps you focus on products or services that are likely to record healthier sales margins. Just as proper location influences the amount of sales that a business records, proper keywords also determine the amount of incoming visitor traffic to your website. The web is filled with various types of keyword research tools, all of which differ both in the way they work and how they present data. Some of the most popular keyword research tools include Wordtracker, NicheBot, Trellian Keyword Discovery and Digital Point Keyword Suggestion tool.

Back end Tools

Another search engine marketing solutions that work are back-end tools. Back end tools are of two categories: HTML validators and Web analytic tools, which analyze and present data on a website and the amount of visitor traffic it records to enable the measurement of its popularity. Web analytic search engine marketing solutions measure your website's success using tools such as Traffic Counter Control which use log files and page-tagging tools and JavaScript. Some of the most important tools used by EBSCO include Hitbox which involves tag-based analysis, WebTrends which analyzes long files and Tea Leaf RealiTea, which is based on transaction analysis. Validators are used to uncover any hidden and potential problems present in your website. Your web pages must be validated in accordance with W3C standards. There are various HTML simulators and validators you can use to report on different aspects of your website.

Whois Tools

These search engine marketing solutions provide you with details of the owners of various website and information touching on trademark and copyright issues. If you type in a website's domain name on a Whois search tool, it will scour through several domains and provide the required results such as the name, address, contact information, billing and administrative information. This also helps you find out if a certain domain name is already taken up.

Website Popularity and Saturation

The fourth search engine marketing solutions are website popularity and saturation analysis tools. With such tools, you can measure the popularity of your website in search engines based on the number of web pages of your site that are indexed there (saturation) and the number of backlinks to the site (popularity). This measures how rich with keywords such pages are, and their top ranking on search engine pages indicate that the keywords match what the visitors are searching for.  Some popular search engine marketing solutions used to measure link popularity and saturation include Top 10 Google Analysis, Link Popularity by Marketleap, Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation

Interested in learning more about online marketing options for your business?

Get Down to Business 2012- "Helping you reach your next great customer",an action-packed, free business building event will be hosted by Onsharp and Constant Contact on May 21^st at the Radisson in Fargo, North Dakota during National Small Business Week.

Events are happening in 50 cities across the nation during May 16^th - 25^th and features many great speakers and topics. The Fargo, ND eventwill feature presentations and a panel about:

• Proven tips and strategies for reaching your next great customer
• How to get existing customers to bring you new ones
• How to create engaging marketing campaigns
• And answers to your questions from our panelists

The Fargo Radisson is the location of the event beginning at 8:30am with a check-in and networking time starting at 7:45am. Registration is required.

So whether you have all the customers you can handle or if you're looking for new ones, you'll find tons of useful info that will help you boost your bottom line in no time.

About Constant Contact, Inc.

Constant Contact is revolutionizing the success formula for small organizations through affordable, easy-to-use Engagement Marketing™ tools that help create and grow customer relationships. More than 450,000 small businesses, nonprofits, and associations worldwide rely on Constant Contact to drive ongoing customer dialogs through email marketing, social media marketing, event marketing, and online surveys. All Constant Contact products come with unrivaled KnowHow, education, and free coaching with a personal touch, including award-winning customer support.

About Onsharp

Onsharp is an interactive agency that architects, builds, and supports web-based solutions. We're passionate about technology, but not just because we think it's cool. We are experts at helping businesses understand how new technologies and trends can help them meet customer demand while improving productivity. Onsharp strives to create success in the lives of all people, businesses, and communities they serve. For more information about Onsharp, please visit www.onsharp.com or call toll-free at 1.866.ONSHARP.

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Since Facebook has released Timeline, users have been debating the positives and negatives of the new layout. Onsharp has developed a free guide to maximize the benefits of Timeline for business pages with their downloadable Ebook, "Make Facebook Timeline Work For Your Business".

Facebook Timeline comes with many new features including a more informational "About Us" section, a visually enticing cover photo and the opportunity to highlight posts. Onsharp's new Ebook takes readers through the changes, while teaching how to best implement these changes to create an attractive, user-friendly page.

Businesses must be careful, however. The new business pages follow a strict set of guidelines set by Facebook. If these rules are not followed, Facebook has the right to shut down a business's page. The Ebook also goes through these guidelines. "We do need to comply with these rules because Facebook can disable your account," said John Jorgenson, Online Marketing Developer. "That can be devastating for a business depending on their social media plan."

Visit our website to download "Make Facebook Timeline Work For Your Business". This book can help to amp up your business's Facebook account. "Online marketing using social media such as Facebook, is a huge part of today's marketing strategy, and you don't want to get left behind," said Tami Dowers, Marketing and Public Relations Director.    

The total came in Monday morning confirming Onsharp's loss to Western Products and Affiliates during last week's Penny War. But the real winners were the American Heart Association (AHA) and the Make-a-Wish Foundation® who received the proceeds from the competition.

An overhead announcement happened yesterday early afternoon with the totals of the Penny War. Onsharp earned 429 points, but they couldn't beat Western Products' hefty 14,136 points. According to the rules, pennies and paper money counted as positive points, and silver counted as negative. In total, the American Heart Association will be receiving a donation of $73.51 and the Make-A-Wish Foundation®   will receive $170.43.

Although Onsharp was winning as of the mid-week count (thanks to a donation of pennies from a Facebook fan), a one hundred dollar bill was dropped into the Western Products' bucket just before the end of the contest on Friday.  Congratulations to the AHA and Make-a-Wish foundation on their win! Thank you to all participants who made the donations possible!

Onsharpis an interactive agency that architects, builds, and supports web-based solutions. We're passionate about technology, but not just because we think it's cool. We are experts at helping businesses understand how new technologies and trends can help them meet customer demand while improving productivity. Onsharp strives to create success in the lives of all people, businesses, and communities they serve. For more information about Onsharp, please visit www.onsharp.com or call toll-free at 1.866.ONSHARP.

Do you want to have a website that will attract qualified visitors? Of course you do, why else would you have a website? No matter if you are designing a website for a non-profit or a for-profit business, your purpose is to create a site that will drive as many targeted visitors as you can. In order to make sure that your website is able to do this, you need to have a web marketing plan in place.

Web marketing plans are the foundation of making sure that your website will be a success. The marketing plan brings people to your website and hopefully keeps them coming back. A successful marketing plan includes many components; some important ones are listed below:

Components to Include in Your Web Marketing Plan

1)      Target Audience:Do you know who you are trying to attract to your website? This is the most important question to answer as your whole web marketing plan is going to be aimed at attracting your target audience. Your website is going to be designed in a way in which to not only bring in your target audience but also to retain them as customers. If you aren't sure of who your target audience is you need to figure out immediately.

2)     Relevant Content:Once you have determined your target audience you are going to want to make sure that the content you have on your site is relevant and is aimed at your target audience. Make sure that you are updating your site often to make sure that all the information you are presenting is relevant and up to date.

3)     Social Media:How are you going to reach your target audience? Do you have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. accounts? These are all great social media platforms that are available for you to use for free! These platforms are great ways to market your business as well as to build your branding. Make sure that you know the ins and outs of each of the platforms that you choose to use so you can make sure to use them in the most effective ways.

4)     Goals:Your web marketing plan should have goals laid out so that you know exactly what it is you are trying to achieve with your plan. By setting up goals, you are also setting up strategies and tactics that will be used to achieve each of the goals.  You can't expect to achieve a goal of greater profitability if you do not set forth how you are going to achieve it. Make sure you set realistic goals and remember that you can also go back and adjust your goals as needed.

5)     Tracking Metrics:You need to be sure to include some sort of tracking metric in your web marketing plan so that you are able to see if your plan is having success. Having specific things you can track each week will better enable you to see what is working with your plan and what is not. Some things to consider tracking are:

• % of traffic coming from Social Media
• Weekly Profits
• Increases and decreases in amount of traffic each week/month

The Internet offers a huge market for businesses to effectively target themselves. However simply setting up a website isn't going to cut it, you need to have plan that will effectively help market your site. There is a lot of marketing that you need to do in order to make sure that you are getting your message and products out there to your target audience.

If your business or company doesn't have a web marketing plan, then you need to make one today.  If you are unsure of your plan or need help with one, contact Onsharp for an initial consultation.

Interested in learning SEO? Learn the fundamentals from our free download SEO Simplified: Beginner's Basics

Monday marks the beginning of an exciting five days in the Onsharp office.  At Onsharp, we are just as passionate about helping our community be successful as we are about our clients. Onsharp is dedicated not only to our clients but also to our friends and neighbors. This is incredibly evident at our office this week as we have many exciting events going on. First off, Onsharp is helping out the Lakes Area Heart Walk by competing in a Penny War against our "friendly-rival" Western Products. Also going on this week, Onsharp's SmartPay team is planning and participating in daily Earth Week activities concluding with an outing on Friday to clean the park down the block from the office.

Change for Change

If you've ever heard of a Penny War, you know how much fun they can be! If you haven't heard of a Penny War the concept is pretty simple, Onsharp wants the most pennies and paper to win.  However rival teams, in this case Western Products, can place silver pieces like nickels, dimes and quarters to count against the total number of pennies and paper. At the end of the week, the totals raised will go to the respective causes and the winner gets bragging rights as the Penny War Champion. Onsharp is hoping to be victorious as we've already give quite a bit of silver to Western Products' bucket who is raising money for Make-a-Wish.

SmartPay's Earth Week

This year, Earth Week is celebrated April 16-22 and SmartPay is encouraging everyone to "go green." Created by Onsharp, SmartPay is a paperless billing and payment system that allows businesses to send invoices electronically and receive payments electronically. Electronic payments help save a lot of paper, but there are also many other things that you can do to help our environment. During Earth Week SmartPay encourages you to participate with us in a few "green" activities. They will be simple things that you may already do!

• Recycle all office paper, cans, bottles, and other recyclable products that you use during the week and place in proper receptacles.
• Bring reusable cups and mugs instead of paper or Styrofoam ones. 
• Turn off computers completely at the end of the work day.
• If interested, calculate your carbon footprint (it takes about 5 minutes) and make one goal for the year to help minimize your footprint. You may be surprised at your impact on the environment. 

Getting involved!

We love giving back and getting involved in a variety of causes like the Lakes Area Heart Walk and Earth Day activities. Our combined efforts can help make a difference in our community to improve each other's lives. If you want to help us, you can donate to the Lakes Area Heart Walk:

If you want to join us for our Earth Day activity on Friday afternoon you can meet us at the Village West Park on the corner of 45^th St and 9^th Ave S. where will be cleaning up the park from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

If you are a business or company with a website than you have probably heard the term "social bookmarking" however you may not be sure what it is exactly or how to do it. Well this is your lucky day as this article will fill you in on the basics of social bookmarking and the role it should play in your online marketing strategy.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking  is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and "tagging" them with keywords. It's a way for people to save their favorite web pages online. Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online.  By using social bookmarking online, people can  access their favorite bookmarks  from any computer and share them with other people. 

Why is it Important for your business/company?

Social bookmarking should play a role in your online marketing strategy because it is a great way to generate traffic. Every time you add a bookmark to one of your pages in one of these sites you create a backlink, which helps you and your website gain more visibility.

Social bookmarking generates traffic in a couple different ways:

• Searching and Browsing: When people search the social bookmarking websites they can find your website very easily. Whether people are just in the social bookmarking sites simply browsing or searching for something specific, they could easily stumble upon your bookmark and click through to your website.

• Search Engine Traffic/ Page Rank: Bookmarking pages means you are linking your pages, which results in higher page rank. This means that you will get better rankings in the search results so that people will be able to find your website easier and faster.

How to do Social Bookmarking

It is not hard to start social bookmarking; in fact it is fairly easy. Here are some quick tips on how you can optimize social bookmarking in your online marketing strategy.

• Make sure that each piece of content you bookmark is optimized for keywords. You want to create backlinks to your site using your keywords so be sure to include them in your title, your tags, and your description.

• Join some social bookmarking sites such as stumbleupon, delicious, digg, and redditt and start bookmarking your links. It is also important that you create a network with each of these sites, so follow some people in hopes that they will follow you back.

• Make sure when you bookmark your links that you are choosing the best category to place them in. You want to make sure that the category you choose is highly related to your content, so that people will find it relevant and want to click it.

• Be on Facebook and Twitter. Post interesting content that has links to your website to that people can simply click your link to access your website. Posting questions is a good way to actively engage your followers and will help your website generate more traffic.

Social bookmarking can make a huge impact when it comes to optimizing your online marketing strategy. It helps generate backlinks, improves page ranks, and brings more traffic to your website, which is ultimately your overarching goal with online marketing.  

 If you liked this post, you might also like our free presentation of SEO Simplified: Beginner's basics

Since the mobile specific website for Onsharp launched earlier this month, visitors may argue that the mobile site is cooler than the full site. The full site, www.onsharp.com, launched in January 2012 with a fresh, visitor focused design. And it is pretty cool. But the mobile version has many reasons it might be the cooler site.

Mobile responsiveness is one of the greatest benefits of the new mobile website. When typing Onsharp.com into a browser, the site knows if the visitor is using a computer, tablet, or mobile phone. If a visitor is using a mobile device, they will be automatically served the mobile version of Onsharp.com. The responsiveness means no more painful scrolling or zooming in until a small fraction of the site is readable.

Most of the time, mobile visitors of Onsharp.com are not looking to spend hours reading every page. Our mobile visitors find simplified navigation that includes the option to visit the full site. The main pages of the mobile site include Contact, Services, Clients, and Full Site. By offering these four easy to read pages, customers can usually find what they are looking for quickly and efficiently.

At the beginning of the mobile discussion, the question was whether Onsharp needed a mobile site or a mobile app. For now, a site will satisfy the needs and desires of our clients and website visitors. There was no need for a fun game about web development or any type of support or service app. In the future, Onsharp clients may be able to submit a support ticket or see a dashboard of the custom software being developed by Onsharp with a mobile app. Until then, customers can explore the custom mobile site.

The mobile site can be viewed on a regular laptop or desktop by visiting m.onsharp.com  (although it looks weird since it is designed for small screens.) Is the mobile site cooler than the full site for Onsharp.com? The visitors will have to decide!

Onsharp is an interactive agency that architects, builds, and supports web-based solutions. We're passionate about technology, but not just because we think it's cool. We are experts at helping businesses understand how new technologies and trends can help them meet customer demand while improving productivity. Onsharp strives to create success in the lives of all people, businesses, and communities they serve. For more information about Onsharp, please visit www.onsharp.com or call toll-free at 1.866.ONSHARP.

Almost everyone has heard of Facebook and Twitter, but there's a whole other social media network out there that has been making waves: Pinterest. Last year at this time the site had only 400,000 users, but now the site has grown to over 11 million users. Pinterest is great for individuals but can also be great for businesses.  Pinterest can be a great online marketing tool once you know what it is and how to effectively use it.

What is Pinterest?

When you think of Pinterest think about a bulletin board meeting a social network. It is a virtual pin board that allows users to "pin" pictures of foods, crafts, ideas, and more to online "boards" they have created. Basically all you do is set up an account and then create your boards. These boards can be named anything you want, but are usually named after a large topic such as home decorating or food ideas. Once your boards are created all you do is "pin" images that you either upload yourself or find across the internet. If people like your image they can then "re-pin" it. If it sounds complicated, it's not. I promise it will only take you a couple minutes to fully gain understanding of Pinterest and how it works.

Using it Effectively for Your Business

It will do you no good to get a Pinterest account if you don't know how to use it effectively. Here are some tips for getting and effectively using your Pinterest account.

1)      First of all you need to decide if you and Pinterest are a match. If your brand is very visual then Pinterest is great for you. Since Pinterest is all about a visually appealing product, if you don't have visuals than Pinterest probably isn't a great online market tool for you.

2)      If Pinterest is a match for you, then you will need to get invited. You can sign up to get an invite, but it is much easier and quicker to find someone who is already on Pinterest and have them invite you.  Chances are you probably know someone who is on Pinterest so this shouldn't be an issue.

3)      Add a "Pin It" button to your product pages so that you and any visitor to your website are able to "pin" your products.

4)      Start Pinning. Make sure you create boards that let your users know exactly what they can find on them. Then start pinning up pictures of your brand and products.

5)      Make sure to include your URL. The whole point of using Pinterest for your business is to create backlinks to your website so make sure you are including a link that will allow users to reach your site.

6)      Let your employees know that your business is on Pinterest so they can start "re-pinning" your pins. This will get your pins the most exposure, which will hopefully result in you getting more website traffic.

Pinterest can be a great online marketing tool if you are a very visual brand. If you haven't checked into Pinterest yet, you should. If you need help managing your Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or other social media platforms feel free to contact us for a consultation.