This site audit is my gift to Chrystal Bougon in return for her generous contribution to Team in Training and the Leukemia Lymphoma Society on my behalf. Thank you Chrystal!

Did the title get your attention?

This reminds me of when I was running for student body secretary. I guess was a born marketer and didn’t even know it.

One of my campaign posters was completely black except for big, white text that read SEX, and under that in very tiny white print it said, “Now that I have your attention, vote for Kathy for secretary.”

It worked because during the lunch hour on the first day I posted it, a crowd of students flocked around it. Problem is, it offended the janitor so he took it down and gave me a tongue lashing. But I had already accomplished my goal, i.e., get attention.

That was then, but times have changed. These days people are much more open about their sexuality and Chrystal Bougon is using that to her advantage with her off and online adult toy store called “Bliss Connection.”

And while she’s doing well locally, she’s not getting much attention in the national market. This is because her business exists in a VERY CROWDED space and competes online against big guns (no pun intended) that spend upwards of $140,000 a month on PPC ads to assure they are seen on that first page in Google!

Or, what I learned from Hedgehog Books

Way, way back in time, I took on the job of creating an online bookstore for a couple of teachers who wanted to provide a place where parents could find and buy teacher-recommended books for their children. The name of the site was “Hedgehog Books.”

The name itself conjured up all kinds of cutesy things so we hired an artist to paint our home page, and cute it was. Our artist created a forest scene for us with a hedgehog reading a book to a group of fine, fun, and furry friends. When she was done, I took it into Photoshop and painted in street signs to serve as links into the site. It was, I have to say, when of the cutest home pages I had ever seen.

Local SEO advice coming your way via Kat & Mouse’s “Free SEO Friday” audit for KickAss Coach

Congratulations to Vicki Garcia for winning our free site audit! Follow along as I tell Vicki how she can improve her website so that it ranks high in Google Places for local business search queries.

To begin, let me compliment Vicki on her great looking website! No one should underestimate the value of a pretty page. It speaks of her professionalism and her insistence on quality which as a consumer might also lead me to believe she does the same in her business.

You can have your dessert and eat it too

I love and recommend Joomla to my clients for their websites when there is a need for advanced functionality that WordPress does not provide, but when it comes to Joomla blog extensions, I’m not so thrilled. I’d much rather put my clients into a WordPress blog because it is by far the most widely supported blog platform out there. And just as Joomla has just about every extension you could ever want to extend its functionality, so does WordPress. I hate to limit my customers’ possibilities with anything else.

So you can imagine how delighted I was to find Corephp’s WordPress to Joomla bridge extension.