You heard it right. We are expanding! We will now be offering a myriad of services in the Grand County area, such as online marketing, website design and mobile websites. Our second office will be based in Granby, Colorado. Halfway between Grand Lake and Winter Park, Granby is a great central location for the county.
And for all you long time Summit County faithfuls, don’t worry—we won’t be neglecting you!
Coming from Summit County, we are still able to offer our expertise in the unique culture of mountain and tourist towns to help your business succeed online.
I get this complaint from prospective clients a fair amount. The clients usually have a decent website, but have done little to no search engine optimization. In past years, building a website was enough to show up in search results. This is no longer true.
As of April 7th, 2014, there are 1.79 billion pages on the internet. So while your site is likely being indexed, it is being lost in the sea of other websites, isn’t indexing for the proper keywords and only comes up for your company name or domain name.
Obviously, this is a huge problem. What good is a website if no one can find it? 68% of users click on the first 3 results only. Even if you are buried on secondary pages, you are unlikely to get a lot of exposure.
Here’s where search engine optimization comes in. Consider it like marketing for websites. Whether we are editing the on page text for keywords, altering the code of the page to contain important tags, social media or content marketing, SEO is essential for creating exposure for your website.
Just like marketing, SEO is not an exact science. We do extensive research to learn what keywords have the best opportunity for your business. Often we see specific keywords that are highly competitive and others that have great room for growth. Our job is to find those opportunities and capitalize on them.
Would you start a business without marketing? No. Likewise, you can’t build an online presence without proper marketing in the form of SEO.
Ashley: Now, currently, Kristy Lee is working on our website here at TV8 Summit. We’ll be able to debut that here for you soon. You should go check it out just to compare because it’s not what we want right now. It’s great to know the different options that we do have. Now, something that we’re setting up with you is going to be our ability to update our videos and our content on a daily basis. Why do feel like it’s important for people to be able to edit their own websites?
Kristy Lee: Right. There’s a couple of reasons. The main one is that Google values websites that have fresh content and that are up to date. They value them higher than just static websites. It’s super important that you are constantly keeping your website current, adding sales, deals.
For this weekend, I was trying to look up about two-for-ones. I couldn’t find a single website that advertised whether or not yes, we do have them, no, we don’t have them because none of the websites are up to date. People want to know what’s going on. That’s the best way to do it. Instead of calling your web developer every week, you can do it yourself.
Ashley: Right. When you sit down with people to help them create the website that they want, you can actually set that up for them.
Kristy Lee: Right, right. Usually we build it in WordPress. It’s WordPress, an open source software, that will allow you to edit your own different sections. You’re not editing the whole website. You can change photos. You can update galleries. You can add new pages and you can add different facets of the website.
Ashley: Right. For us, we’re going to be updating our Summit Sunrise videos and also things with our shows, but really nice to know that you can take control of it. You build the framework and then we get to decorate it, if you will.
Kristy Lee: Right, right. We’ll set it up for you, initially, the first time as well as train you on it and train you how to use it and give you documentation how to use it so you’re not out on your own just figuring it out.
Ashley: For people that are interested, maybe they don’t even have a website, maybe they’d like to do something like that, how do you get started? What’s the first step?
Kristy Lee: Usually, we will sit down with somebody and discuss their project or discuss their business, then work up a plan about what we think based on what you want to do and what we think you can do, how we can improve things that you already have. We’ll do a project consultation to just discuss what’s going to work for you.
Ashley: How does that work? Do you have to pay up front?
Kristy Lee: Right. We do a free project consultation. Just to get you started, you can sit down with us for 30 minutes and we’ll discuss your project and go from there.
Ashley: That’s amazing. Did you guys hear that? Free project consultation. That’s great if you’ve been thinking about it for a little while or you’re just, “I want to tweak this or that.” You can sit down and chat about it first before you have to decide to pay for anything. Something that we did discover with this whole process is it’s a lot more affordable than you might think that it is. Then there’s a lot of different options, too. Maybe people have a website and they’re, “I love my website, but maybe I want a mobile website.” You guys can do that as well.
Kristy Lee: We do that as well, yes. A lot of people, they don’t quite know how to use their website and how to make their website work for them. We can help you with that as well, help you get more traffic, help you convert leads into sales and discuss various ways to make it a more effective website.
Ashley: I’ll tell you what you guys, they’re amazing. Their work is incredible and it’s all local. If you have any questions, make sure you get in touch with Kristy Lee. The best way is how?
Kristy Lee: My website is KLCreativeDesign.com.
Ashley: All right, you guys, check it out. We’ll be right back with more Summit Sunrise.
Designing a solid logo is a point of struggle for many a small business owner. A good logo design is crucial to any branding program. A good logo fits seamlessly with your company, supporting your message subtly and without notice. A poorly designed logo stands out like a sore thumb, presenting a less than positive image of your company and dictating your interactions from then on out.
In my years as a designer and web programmer, I have come across many great logos and many poor logos. The poor logos usually have a few common trends and are often the result of cutting corners.
Here are a few common pitfalls I have seen.
Overcomplicated.
We’ve got gradients, pretty backgrounds, photos and colors overlaid on colors. Avoid the temptation to add every facet of your business into the logo. While your logo can be an iconic representation of who you are, it doesn’t need to tell the whole story. Simple is better. Think of the Golden Arches. Were you aware the Golden Arches was originally an ‘M’? Me neither. But I am sure that you know exactly which company has the golden arches.
The point here is to keep it simple. You have seconds to make an impression on a user and the more info you try to throw at them, the less they will remember.
According to Solomon, there is nothing new under the sun. That being said, you don’t all have to have the same logo! Here in the mountains, we all love the gorgeous landscape we wake up to every morning. About half the logos I see in this area contain mountains or a mountain ridge or some sort and it is difficult to make it seem new and fresh. (My apologies if your logo falls into this category.)
Logos should avoid overused themes, stock photography, or copying a competitor.
Lack of Scalability
A good logo will look good across many mediums. When choosing a logo, think how it will display from a large sign front to a business card or T-shirt. There is a trend right now for thin lined fonts. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as it will still be readable in all sizes. What about those backgrounds? How are they going to look on your letterhead? A good logo should be scalable and adaptable.
Lindsey: The main thing that we’ve been focusing a lot lately with KL Creative Design is SEO and with that is tied into keywording which is our topic today. Inform us all about that.
KL: Keywords are searchable terms that people might enter into Google to find you. Ideally, you would want them to come to you. You want to ideally be in the top three results as they get about 70% of the traffic comes from the top three results. So keywords, someone comes in and they type “TV station Summit County.” We want them to come to your site. How do we make that happen?
That’s what keywording is all about … We do a lot of research to figure out which keywords have the best amount of searches as well as the least amount of competition. We figure out the ratio between the two for the least competition for the most amount of searches. Then we optimize a specific page or your entire site for those keywords that we have. That’s how we try and drive traffic to your site through the keywording.
Lindsey: Now you can pick your own keywords that you would like to be most related to you? Is that how that works?
KL: The way I would usually work it with clients is that they know their business better than anyone. So, yes, we work with them and get an idea. Then we’ll take, between the two of us, myself and the client and will come up with about 10 or 15 different keywords. Then we’ll do the research on them. Sometimes I’ve found that a client is already number one for a particular keyword. So, we’re not going to do any SEO on that one. Whereas another one, they’re not doing that great in it, but there’s excellent room for improvement in it.
We’ll do the ratios and find the best ratio and then pick four or five of those keywords from that list. We work with you to figure that all out. Just because you’re not specifically optimizing for a specific keyword doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to find you for that. It doesn’t mean that it can’t be a part of your site. It’s just that we pick four or five because we find that drives the traffic up the best. It gives you the best results.
Lindsey: That correlates to the SEO because SEO is what makes you first or second on the page.
KL: Yes. Right.
Lindsey: When you type in Google, usually you go to the first three.
KL: Uh-huh. (affirmative)
Lindsey: That’s what that is, right?
KL: Yes. Keywording is a part of search engine optimization and, frankly, it’s a big part of it. You need to do the keywording and the research behind that to figure out what to optimize for.
Lindsey: Very cool. Also, I think this is interesting because it’s a lot of people that are on vacation here right now that aren’t current in Summit County. This is not just for local residents.
KL: Right.
Lindsey: KL can work with anyone anywhere in the nation.
KL: Mm-hmm. (affirmative)
Lindsey: We also talked last week. We’ll just touch on it a little bit here because we could add to it about mobile websites.
KL: Mm-hmm. (affirmative)
Lindsey: That’s really important because everyone’s nowadays with their phone or trying to trying to drive.
KL: Right. It’s very important that you have a mobile website. We’re actually finding that also has an effect on your search engine optimization. If you don’t have a website that looks proper on a phone, Google actually doesn’t rank you as high which is huge. So, we want your website to look when you come to it on the phone, there’s no zooming, there’s no pinching. You’re not fighting to find the content that you want. That’s what you need to have.
So, we build what’s called “responsive web design.” That way, the website shrinks or expands and moves things around accordingly to the screen size. If you’ve got this much real estate, then we might have three columns. If you’ve got this much room, then we have one long column.
Lindsey: See, I feel like I’m only going to go to websites that KL Creative Design works with because as soon as I go to it and it’s not mobile [front sheet 00:04:23] or whatever and it jumps, I just give up.
KL: Right. Most people, they’re gone. The minute it’s frustrating, they’re out.
Lindsey: Even when it asks you to download a mobile website separately.
KL: Right.
Lindsey: That confuses me because I don’t want to download anything on my phone.
KL: Mm-hmm. (affirmative) Or you can’t find certain information because it directs you somewhere else and it only has 50% of the information. That’s frustrating and that’s the last thing you want to do is frustrate your users. You want to make the content nice and easy, easy and smooth for them to find.
Lindsey: Especially in today’s world everyone is always in a hurry.
Lindsey: Right.
Lindsey: KL Creative Design, they will make it user-friendly, accommodating for everyone. Keywording is the biggest thing so you can be number one when you are Google-searched.
(This is a two part series. If you aren’t familiar with content marketing, get caught up here with our blog post, “What is CONTENT MARKETING?”. )
So you know you need marketing for your website or business. You also know that content marketing is where it’s at right now. But how? How does the small business, with limited resources and the never ending task list, participate in content marketing? I’d like to show you that content marketing is attainable for you and your business with a few practical examples of content marketing. This is no way conclusive, as any good marketing plan will be tailored to the individual business and target market.
Blogging
Blogging often has negative connotations for small business owners, so don’t click away just yet. As a small business owner myself, I know how limited your time can be. The fact of the matter is that blogging is the cornerstone of content marketing. It is hosted on your website, which you (hopefully) own, and is the main gateway or central location for all the content you or a hired writer will create.
(Note: Yes, you can hire content writers to help build the content for content marketing. We will even help you market it out.)
Blogging creates a voice for your business to connect with its potential clients. This voice gives your business a human element that your potential clients can connect with. It makes you personable and approachable.
Email marketing sees some of the highest success rates, solely because people have chosen to be a part of it. By opting in to receive the emails, they are much more receptive to it. This goes hand in hand with blogging, as any blog posts can be a converted to emails and sent out on a regular basis.
Photos
Photos are quick and easy to digest. With the rise of Instagram, Pinterest and the like, photo blogging can be a great source of content. This works great for businesses such as real estate, design orientated businesses, retail or local marketed businesses. Take a photo with your phone and shoot it on over to Hootsuite to send out to your social media sites.
Did you know that mobile users watch more video, and longer videos then their desktop counterparts? Video content is easily digestible and desirable by the mobile user. These videos don’t have to be filled with crazy animations and heavily edited. All they need to do is portray a message and be uploaded to YouTube and your blog.
We often optimize them with keywords and specific coding as well, to increase ranking and SEO power.
Press and Media coverage
Anyone talking about you? Brag a little! Post it up on your site, with a link (which is beneficial for them as well).
Teach
Tutorial videos, product reviews, night classes, frequently asked questions, webinars, e-books: the list goes on.
These are all things that your clients need, want and will come looking for. Why not put these online? Some might wonder if teaching your business skills would empower clients instead of converting them into sales. The fact of the matter is that most of our businesses cannot be taught in a simple article or class. Teaching gives brand recognition, brand loyalty, while allowing clients to feel like “part of the team”. Educated clients are better clients. While you might lose one or two, the benefits outweigh the negatives.
I hope these ideas get your creative juices rolling! The list is far from conclusive, and the best content marketing plan is hand tailored to your business. If you are interested in learning more about how you can incorporate content marketing into your business, give us a call and meet up over coffee with a KLCD team member to discuss some ideas for your business. Click here to schedule a consultation meeting.
Phew! It’s done. After many late nights, much debate, building and tearing down, and the occasional scream of frustration our new website is live and in the wild!
We’re pretty excited to see the new site in action and proud of our work. Not only do we have a new website, we have a new logo and a complete rebranding!
Take a look and let us know what you think! And don’t forget to check it out on your mobile device!
According to Wikipedia, content marketing is “any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers.”
With the constant barrage of advertising, we are becoming increasingly creative about avoiding it. It becomes like white noise in the background- just another person/product vying for our attention. Content marketing attempts to get around that by creating something useful and relevant that consumers want, need and will come looking for.
Let’s give an example scenario.
You recently decided that you are going to be become a long distance runner. You are going to be the best long distance running there ever was. Obviously, you will need some gear, specifically a good pair of running shoes. So you head on over to google to. Googling “best running shoe ever” gets you nowhere. There are entirely too many choices. You will need to learn a bit about the different types of shoes and fits before making your decision. So you google “how to buy running shoes”. This leads you to an article about the different types of running shoes. Useful. Let’s read that. Maybe they have a video about it. Next, you meander through their “related articles” section to something about how your walking stance effects your shoe fit.
A few articles later, you are feeling smarter and more prepared to make your purchase. Now, the big ticket question: who are you more likely to purchase from? The website you just spend an hour getting to know or a stranger?
Content marketing changes the perspective of the business in your mind. No longer are they just another name in the sea of businesses vying for your attention. They are knowledgable experts in their field and approachable by consumers like you. They have risen above the competition and been noticed.
I don’t have to tell you have valuable this is.
Now I know what your next question is going to be. But how do I do that? My next blog post, coming out next week, will tackle just that question! See you soon!
How many times have you visited YouTube this week? Today?
According to recent statistics, 55% of users have watched a YouTube video today and 80% in the past week. Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website behind Google and Facebook.
Let’s face it, the popularity of YouTube (and its purchase by Google in 2006) has changed the way we browse the internet as well as online marketing. Video marketing is no longer “nice to have”; it’s necessary.
Here’s a few reasons why.
Many people prefer video over reading.
Our brains can process the visual images at a faster rate than reading, therefore more information can be communicated, and without the limitations of static text. Because Google is offering standard web links, as well as video links, users that prefer video communication will choose this over a static website.
SEO and video content
Have I mentioned that Google ranks videos separately? Because of this, your video may rank higher for a keyword than your website does! We then optimize your video create brand awareness, product information and drive traffic to your website.
And yes, we do keyword and script out videos for optimal SEO power. We also share it across video-sharing platforms, social media, our blog posts etc. Video is an integral part of online marketing and content marketing.
Humanization of the Brand
I have a good friend in TV. Walking down the street with her can make you feel like an awkward teenager with your mom as she is frequently stopped by “friends”. I once asked her about it and she told me the truth. Because she was seen on TV, people felt like they knew her and frequently approached her. She personally didn’t know a large portion of those people, but they knew her. Video does the same thing for your business. Customers are more comfortable with the brand, they trust it and are more likely to purchase, before ever walking in your door.
Along the same lines, video presents YOU as the expert in your field. Whether you are doing product reviews, tutorials, industry commentary or whatever fits with your business, they will begin to see you as the go-to person in that field.
Video and the Mobile Phone
I was surprised to read that recent stats say people are much more likely to watch videos on the mobile phone, as well as view for up to 5x as long! It seems mobile users prefer video to reading. This may change as more and more mobile optimized sites pop up, but in the meantime, this is a great way to leverage your mobile users.
I don’t have to tell you how valuable this is for brand awareness and marketing. Video marketing can be a form of networking, with a much broader net than you could ever cover yourself.
The possibilities are endless. Here at KL Creative Design, we consider video an integral part of marketing.
Lindsey: Hello everyone. I’m in the studio here with Kristy Lee from KL Creative Design. Welcome. Tell us about KL Creative Design.
Kristy Lee: KL Creative Design is a web development firm with a focus on mobile development.
Lindsey: Let’s talk about social media and marketing, how everyone can benefit from that?
Kristy Lee: Social media marketing basically is marketing yourself, on either Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest. We’ll do programs like that. Usually, we like to hand tailor them, according to the business. Some things work better for other business, like crafts do great on Pinterest. LinkedIn are great for business to business. Whereas Facebook is great for business to consumer.
We’ll discuss different ways to tweet, what to tweet about, how to schedule it out, and how to market yourself on the social media sites.
Lindsey: That’s really the way to go to help increase your business as well.
Kristy Lee: Right, it’s an excellent advertising. Again, I think the statistics are 1 in 8 minutes, people spend on Facebook. 1 in 8 minutes, they’re on Facebook. That’s where the people are, that’s where you should be as well, for a business. Again, we’re finding that more and more people are surprised at how often they should be doing this. We suggest 1 to 3 tweets, I’m sorry, 1 to 3 Facebook posts a day and 5 to 10 tweets a day. Different ratios of different strategies for each one. How often you should be on these sites. How to present yourself and be a presence, without being annoying, basically.
Lindsey: Right and that’s a way to network too, world wide.
Kristy Lee: Right.
Lindsey: It also increases your business as well. We talked before, earlier, about SEO content. That can correlate with that as well, right?
Kristy Lee: Right. It can be part of SEO because Google Plus is a big part of this. It’s supported by Google. If you post an article on Google Plus, it is indexed in less than 6 seconds. That is lightening fast. That means that Google already knows about it and can start promoting it for you. Whereas for normal content, it can take days, for it to be indexed. Again, if you’re promoting on the social media sites, it is going to be ranked higher, and more quickly found, as well.
Lindsey: Awesome. We talked before, because I mentioned my Mom shopping and everything. You said that you can literally do websites for anyone. It doesn’t just have to be in some [county 02:36]. If you’re visiting and you’re going to go back home, to wherever it may be, stop in. Check it out. Get it started here. It’s the best way to go about it. The SEO content, promoting yourself as well. What else would this also benefit us with?
Kristy Lee: For the social media? It’s great for your search engine optimization. It’s great for promotion. It’s great for reach. If you’ve got, running a sale, or you’re anything like that, you’re promoting a new product. You can feature that, on there as well. We also suggest that you do a lot of industry related news, not just self-serving.
Actually, for every 1 self-serving post, you want to do about 4 or 5 industry related ones, or communicating with other people. Again, this presents you as being an expert in your field. It presents you as being someone who knows what you’re talking about and a part of the industry. That’s great for your overall image as well.
Lindsey: Yeah, I think so too. We’ll get him some tweets going. That’s awesome, too. We talked about before that, in general, if you want to do your own website, you can just provide an outline for them. If you want to completely have you control it, you can do that as well.
Kristy Lee: Right.
Lindsey: It’s just a great way for people to get out there and try that. Tell us about how you got started. We talked about that last time. It was kind of intriguing.
Kristy Lee: I’d always liked websites. For me, it works because it combines the art side of things, like design, along with programming, which is math. I’ve always kind of been back and forth between art and math. All growing up, I loved both. Websites puts the 2 of them together. It always just fascinated me and just … I love it. I love doing it. It’s a great industry.
Lindsey: Awesome. To have someone that so passionate about that help you out, help promote your site, help promote your business as well, check out KLCreativeDesign.com. Tell us about just in general, location, hours if they want to stop in, whatever it may be.
Kristy Lee: We’re based out of Breckenridge. My phone number is on the screen there. You can give me a call and set up a time to talk. We can talk about whatever your project is, or whatever you’re working on right now. Yeah, based out of Breckenridge.
I had a potential client ask me recently if KL Creative offers any guarantees or can warranty any specific SEO results such as rankings or traffic. We don’t. Here’s why.
Short answer, taken straight from Google’s own website about SEO: It’s not possible.
No one can guarantee a specific result within Google. And Google warns against SEOs (short for search engine optimizers) that do. The fact of the matter is that google is secretive. While they do offer guidelines and directives, they don’t release a lot about their algorithms for fear that it will be used for evil.
Unfortunately, the SEO world is riddled with companies who have scammed unsuspecting business owners.
Every day, I hear more and more stories. Stories about how they falsified analytics, paid for traffic to a website (which does nothing for conversions), created fake pages that started out strong only to tank in the ranking once Google figured out what was going on, unnatural link schemes, the list goes on. More often than not, SEO scams hurt more than your wallet. If a company is using less than reputable tactics to increase traffic, you can and will be negatively ranked or even removed from rankings by search engines!
Here’s the truth:
SEO (search engine optimization, confusing I know) is marketing. It is an art form, not a science. And marketing is often trial and error. What worked last week, might not work this week. What worked for your friend might not work for you! Whether it be content marketing, social media, keywording or pay per click, each SEO plan should be hand tailored to your business. SEO, like marketing, can be time consuming, difficult to measure and an uphill road.
Here’s what we do guarantee: our experience and our hard work. We can guarantee that the KL Creative team will combine their extensive knowledge, years of experience and hard work to drive more traffic to your site, increase conversions to help your business succeed.
And for all you long time Summit County faithfuls, don’t worry—we won’t be neglecting you! 
As of April 7th, 2014, there are 1.79 billion pages on the internet. So while your site is likely being indexed, it is being lost in the sea of other websites, isn’t indexing for the proper keywords and only comes up for your company name or domain name. 
Here’s where search engine optimization comes in. Consider it like marketing for websites. Whether we are editing the on page text for keywords, altering the code of the page to contain important tags, 
You recently decided that you are going to be become a long distance runner. You are going to be the best long distance running there ever was. Obviously, you will need some gear, specifically a good pair of running shoes. So you head on over to google to. Googling “best running shoe ever” gets you nowhere. There are entirely too many choices. You will need to learn a bit about the different types of shoes and fits before making your decision. So you google “how to buy running shoes”. This leads you to an article about the different types of running shoes. Useful. Let’s read that. Maybe they have a video about it. Next, you meander through their “related articles” section to something about how your walking stance effects your shoe fit.
