Design & Promote Celebrates Its 10 Year Anniversary
Design & Promote Celebrates Its 10 Year Anniversary
Design & Promote, an award-winning Naperville internet marketing company, is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. Entrepreneur Bruce Jones and the team at Design & Promote, an award-winning Chicago search engine optimization (SEO) company and internet marketing firm, are celebrating 10 years of business in Naperville in an industry that has changed remarkably since they opened their doors in 2007.
“When I started the company, my vision was to provide websites that were not only well-designed, but would rank high in the search engines too,” Jones said. “Today we offer even more Naperville internet marketing services, and we’re always keeping up with the continually changing Google algorithms to get our clients ranked on the first page. It’s much harder than it used to be.”
Jones also said mobile responsive design is an area that has grown in importance in the past ten years. “Today people are searching on their phones and tablets so the website design has to instantly reconfigure to these different screens or people will go on to the next competitor,” he said. “Also, people’s attention spans are shorter so we have to communicate more succinctly via graphics and content.”
Jones got his start in internet marketing as the network/internet manager at Tradetec Skyline, an exhibit design firm, where his work in SEO helped grow the company from a $1 million to a $10 million dollar company. He also started helping exhibitors initiate their own search engine optimization campaigns on the side. He quickly noticed how his client’s poor website design, with lackluster images, poor content, bad headlines and confusing navigation would bounce good prospects off the site and basically undermine the SEO efforts.
He was convinced that graphic design and SEO needed to go hand in hand in website development. When the name “Design & Promote” came into his head while taking a shower one day, Jones knew he was ready to launch his Chicago SEO company. Design & Promote began in the basement of Bruce’s south Naperville home where he first gathered a team of talented creatives together, beginning with a graphic designer who remained with the company for the first nine years. The same motto they created in 2007, “our business is to get your business noticed”, is still with them today.
In the summer of 2012, the firm moved to their current Naperville location at 1952 McDowell Rd., Suite 100 to house their rapidly growing staff. Today, the staff of eight serves both business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) companies with web design, SEO and social media marketing to create a successful online presence.
In 2014, Design & Promote earned the Annual Award for Business Excellence (AABE) from the Daily Herald Business Ledger and the Small Business of the Year Award from the Naperville Chamber of Commerce. Bruce is very active in the chamber and currently serves on the organization’s Technology Advisory Group. He is also a frequent speaker and has lent his support to the nonprofit organization “Kids Matter” every year with sponsorship and internet marketing efforts.
In 2015, Design & Promote opened their second office in the CNA building in downtown Chicago at 333 S. Wabash St., Suite 2702 as part of the Signature Office Centers complex.
Beyond Our 10 Year Anniversary
“It’s been a good first 10 years,” said Jones. “In the next 10, we’re looking forward to offering even more businesses the most advanced and effective internet marketing programs to increase their brand awareness and lead generation.”
Design & Promote is in the process of planning an Open House event to commemorate their anniversary. For more information or to join their mailing list, visit www.designandpromote.com.
About Design & Promote
Design & Promote is a Chicago SEO company and internet marketing firm that provides web design, SEO and social media services from Naperville, IL with a second office in downtown Chicago. They employ web designers, SEO experts, and marketing consultants to help clients create an effective internet presence to convert customers and rank high with Google and other search engines. Design & Promote doesn’t just create websites; they create online lead generation portals complemented by SEO and social media campaigns to bring in the right targeted audience. For more information, contact Design & Promote at 630-995-7109.
Planning good blog content month after month presents a significant challenge, even to some seasoned writers. Keeping new content with effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on your site is critical to your search result rankings and to building engagement with your site visitors. How do you keep producing a steady flow of fresh material on your company’s website? Here are some tips for coming up with good blog topics:
- Write For The Customers You Have – Write content aimed at your core customer base most often. Business blogging is evolving quickly, and it’s no longer enough to throw a bunch of keywords into some second-rate content that mostly pertains to your business. Think about what challenges your customers face, and how your products or services can alleviate those. Think about what practices your customers could adopt that would benefit their businesses and cause them to use more of your products in the process. Write about new legislation or standards that may affect your customers. The goal is not simply to bring them to your site; the goal is to write blog posts that they will find helpful and want to share with colleagues. Use your blog content to showcase your expertise and make your site a hub for useful information in your niche.
- Write For The Customers You Want – The next most important set of readers you should be writing blog posts for is the group of customers you want, but do not yet have. As an example, if your company sells industrial gases and your core customers are shops that use welders, ask yourself who else would use industrial gases. They’re used in laboratories, food-processing plants, cryogenics, and by wedding planners, to name a few. The customers you have now are welders, and you should address them, but don’t overlook the opportunity to court new groups of customers by acknowledging them and showing them that you can support their businesses and alleviates their headaches, too.
- Look For The Tangents And Spins – Browse the blogs of competitors and look for points mentioned in their blog posts that you can take and develop into an original (and hopefully better) post of your own. Another way to make use of your competition is to cherry-pick the best points from posts by more than one competitor and combine them into an original piece with your own spin. Take a topic that someone else has covered in broad strokes (like a listicle) and expand it into a series of in-depth pieces.
- Hitch A Ride On The Latest Trend – Always keep an eye out for new trends, product releases, laws or regulations, or breaking news affecting your customers’ businesses. Frame those posts in terms of your customers’ interests, not those of your own business; this is a fine distinction that many bloggers fail to make. Customers return to and interact most frequently with blogs that are in tune with the challenges and opportunities those customers are dealing with. Be the first one to turn your customers’ attention to some helpful new technology or practice, even if it’s not something you sell, and you’re building a loyal following of customers who are more likely to remain engaged.
- Plan Seasonal Content – “Seasonal content” reaches far beyond holidays. How you take advantage of seasonal changes depends on your business. But in general, think of seasonal content as an opportunity to build business for traditionally slow times and to get customers planning your products or services into the budgets for the future. For example, if your company sells and installs windows, winter is going to be a slow season. Plan a post for January that explains how much it could cost customers to “tough out” the rest of the winter with a broken window, and how surprisingly simple it is for your installers to replace that window, even in the snow. Start in March by telling those same customers how important it will be, once the snow melts, to have their windows inspected and take care of any needed repairs of maintenance in order to save money and maintain comfort through the summer.
Plan For Your Most Effective Blog Posts
Taking the time to study the trends of your own industry and those of your customers can offer a wealth of ideas for good blog topics, and so can shopping the competition. Keep a running list of topic ideas, and a master calendar that you’ll refine from year to year as you learn what content resonates most strongly with the customers you have and the ones you hope to gain in future. If you find yourself struggling to find enough topics on a regular basis, start looking for ways to develop short, simple laundry lists into series that will bring readers back at regular intervals to learn more. Working with an SEO company like Design & Promote, Chicago area customers have access to expert advice and professional help with keeping their content fresh and on-target. Contact Design & Promote for a complimentary website audit and additional information about developing effective blog topics for your company’s website.
If you need to launch a blog or just want to improve the one you have, the next seminar at Design & Promote is for you. 
We’re ringing in 2013 with a seminar on “Business Blogs” as part of our monthly Effective Inbound Marketing Strategies Series here at Design & Promote. The event will be held Wednesday, January 16 at our office, 1952 McDowell Rd., Suite 100 from 4:00-6:00 pm in the lower level conference room. The free presentation will be given by Brent Tyson, Lead Developer and WordPress expert at Design & Promote.
Brent will share his experience with implementing blogs for business owners and educate attendees on the value of a blog. Logistics of how to launch them will also be covered. Attendees will learn:
How having a blog can help your business
- How to choose a blogging software
- Why we love WordPress and use it ourselves
- How to create content for your blog
- How to correctly categorize and structure your blog
- How to use a blog to become a knowledge source for your target audience
- How and why to use images in your blog
- How to optimize your blog for the search engines
- How to integrate your blog with Social Media
“I meet many business people who have known they need a blog for some time but still don’t have one. They may even have an empty blog tab on their website but they just don’t have an overall strategy for what to say and how to get it done,” said Brent. “My presentation is designed to help businesses answer questions, build a strategy and create content to launch an effective blog on their site and/or through social media channels.”
Although the event is free, seats are limited and registration is required. To register today, go to http://business-blogs.eventbrite.com. Hope to see you there!
Some Chicago area service businesses have now figured out that social networking and web 2.0 will help them make more sales and connect with more clients. It is surprising that more small businesses have not already jumped on the bandwagon to get the word out about their business and what they do.
It is the perfect way to market, especially if you are on a budget. Plumbers, handymen, and insurance agents are all incorporating web 2.0 into their marketing plans.
Blogging allows you to open up a conversation with people who want to learn more about your services. They can read your posts and then leave comments to give you feedback on each topic you write about. If your industry has made some recent changes, your blog is the best place to let people know. Be sure to use your keywords, including the city you do business in, in the titles of your blog posts. Search engines will also reward you for posting regularly to your blog.
Facebook is one way to connect with prospects and clients in a more personal way. You can import your blog into your homepage on Facebook, giving greater exposure to all of your posts and other information. You can also create a group or a page on Facebook, where prospects can connect with you on an even more personal basis. You can provide advice, discount coupons, and anything else that your clientele may want from you. You are the expert, and it is another way for you to position yourself as an expert in your field to attract new clients.
Twitter is another social networking site that is proving to be good for small businesses. You can include the name of your business and a link back to your company blog or website. In your bio be sure to tell people where you are located if you do business in a specific geographical area. Send a tweet a couple of times a day to let people know what aspect of your business you are engaged in at that time, and use a service like tweet later to send automatic tweets every time you post to your blog.
The idea is for all of this to be less time consuming so that you can focus more time and energy on your business, while still marketing yourself on the internet. If you need help learning how to do all of these things, or with online writing in general, look for someone who offers weekly teleseminars where you can easily get answers to your questions.
I invite you to join me for free weekly teleseminars that will teach you how to blog, use social networking, and write, market, and sell your articles and ebook to increase your visibility, credibility and passive income by visiting http://www.EbookWritingandMarketingSecrets.com and also learn the technology needed to run an online business.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE” error on WordPress Blog?
If you are facing this or even a blank white screen when you try to login to your wordpress blog, you could have been hacked.
Need A Solution For The “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE” error on WordPress Blogs or other PHP sites?
This PHP code error is running rampant through the internet and we just got done fixing several clients blogs that had issues with this this same T_VARIABLE Parse syntax error.
Tracking down all the pieces was quite a chore but we have come up with a solution:
- The first step is to eliminate the infection that is allowing this to happen by using the free version of Super Spyware Cleaner or another good anti spyware program to scan your entire system, the likelihood is great that you have been hit with a backdoor.bot or trojan dot Daonol – using the Super Spyware Cleaner to eliminate these or any variations from all of your workstations and computers that you have used to access your wordpress blog is the first step.
- Change your logins and passwords immediately
- Download a clean copy of WordPress 2.7.1 to your clean uninfected machine
- Using an FTP program copy your wp-config file out of wordpress root and eliminate the code that has been injected in the header section save a copy of your cleaned wp-config file to upload later.
- FTP all the contents of the fresh copy of WordPress 2.7.1 overwriting your current WordPress installation.
- Within your active theme, you will need to remove the injected code out of both the function.php and the index.php as well and ftp the clean copies into your themes folder.
- This php injected script has also been found in some of the plugin’s as well, Cforms and WordPress Back Up are two we are aware of that can be affected.
This is an extensive process, but can be handled within an hour or two if you find yourself at the mercy of the T_VARIABLE error, please feel free to contact us.
We are charging $100.00 for this service to get your blog back up and running, if you are interested please email us at info at designandpromote dot com.
We strongly urge you to go through and change login’s and passwords to any accounts that you may have with hosting providers and personal information to help eliminate the continuation of this particular issue
