Its Another Portland Skyline

Also, several months ago I converted this site over to a WordPress site and also have my old Rants, Raves & Insights blog up and running on this site, too; notwithstanding that I have not posted to it in almost forever it seems. What I noticed was that I had grown tired of the theme I had been using and decided to build a new WordPress theme from the ground up. You are looking at it. I call this WordPress theme, Skyline Two. Website design, coding, Photoshop design and slicing, Flash design and a bunch of PHP coding all go into developing something like this.

This is the second WordPress theme I have built from scratch in the past few weeks. You can see the other theme at Portlands Foreclosures. I also created a landing page for them too. Check out the “Coming Soon” link on that site to see a Real Estate Listings mockup with a nifty Flash intro.

Speaking of Flash … if you haven’t clicked on the PLAY INTRO link on the header image above … do so now. That’s another Flash intro that I am using here; because I Flash adds to a site, but an entire Flash Driven site is not so good for most sites, because Flash still is not as search engine friendly as standard XHTML and CSS driven sites. Nonetheless, Flash still looks cool and adds some pizazz to a site. In fact, I have recently put together a couple other sites that include Flash banners. Check out Just Settle My Debts and Renegotiate My Home Loan websites.

Rather than run on a bunch on this post, I will keep it short by saying that I have also been doing some social media marketing with Facebook and Twitter, some online classified marketing, developed some landing pages, tying some of them to lists and autoresponders. I also put together a few ebooks and done a little bit of work with Joomla, too. I will write more later to update the site.

There are numerous social networks where your message(s) can be seen. Visibility is important; however, you want to be visible in the right marketplace. Rather than spending time blasting your message and ads to the wrong market, or to thousands of others whom you are competing with, try to locate social networks appropriate to your target audience. This methodology employs the same tactics as keyword usage and SEO/SEM. Broad based keywords will have the effect of generating more traffic than narrowly based keywords. However, narrowly defined keywords will generate higher conversion rates. Being more specific and less generalized in your targeting is an important factor to consider when preparing and delivering your message.

Types of Networks

In addition to the well-known multi-purpose networks like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter; depending on your product, service or niche, consider employing vertical markets, social bookmarking sites, recommendation engines, social shopping networks, horizontal markets, virtual worlds, photo sharing and video sharing networks, mobile networks and if appropriate, international networks.

Of the more hotly discussed social media networks, Twitter is so hot now due in part to the fact that it transcends the multi-purpose market and encompasses the mobile empowered network. Even though the majority of the social network options do not share this empowerment, they can nonetheless, be valuable to your campaign(s).

To keep this post short, I will list some of the many other social network options in a soon to follow post. Go ahead and subscribe to this blog so you do not miss out on valuable information and important news.