Flagstaff Central News – Happy Holidays

Good Things at Flagstaff Central

 

Everything here at Flagstaff Central is running smoothly and we thought it’d be nice to send out a quick newsletter to tell you all the “latest news” from our company.

It’s been a beautiful end of Fall and early Winter here in Flagstaff with unusually warm temperatures (until the cold spell this week). We’ve finally gotten “dumped on” and have tons of snow in our area. It is absolutely beautiful! Everyone stay safe out there…

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Happy Holidays and look forward to working with you in the upcoming New Year!

We have lots of great things happening and to tell you, so here goes…

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Donation Zone

 

Every year, during this gift giving season, we try our best to highlight Non-Profit Organizations via our city guide. We believe that supporting those who give back to our community is extremely important. To this end, we move our “Donation Zone” option to the very top of our city guide’s Homepage (in the left column). We always have a Donation Zone page on our site, but we do our best to put it in a special place that is in front of thousands of people during this season.

The Donation Zone box is our way of allowing organizations to collect donations via our site. All we do is provide the means for them to get donations, we don’t actually get involved in the transaction. We have installed a PayPal cart with a drop-down menu that has a list of available organizations that have joined us in this endeavor. When you choose one and donate, the money goes direct to that place.

If you are a non-profit or know of a non-profit that would want to opt into this free service, you simply have to send us the PayPal email address that is linked to their account. It’s as easy as that!

We’d like to also encourage you to make a Charitable Tax Credit
donation if you live in Arizona. Click here for an article we wrote on it!

 

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Get Your Blog Feeding into our City Guide

 

Another way we like to work with the community is through Blog Feeds. Any area business or organization that maintains a Blog (i.e. they write articles online on something like Blogger or WordPress) can request to have their articles fed into the News, News, News section of our city guide.

 

This whole section on our site is dedicated to local News provided by the local community. It is full of area Blog Feeds, FaceBook Feeds, Twitter Feeds, etc… Anyone who is providing good content that would be helpful to our area should have us pull in their information. We love it because it provides great content for our viewers – and we don’t have to maintain it.

 

If you have a Blog that you write on fairly regularly, please email us your Blog URL so that we can consider adding it into our News section. It’s a great way for us to provide content, and it’s a great way for you to have more people read what you write.

 

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New Site Builder Service

 

In the early part of the new year, our company will begin offering a Site Builder Service (i.e. Templated Website Packages). We are currently putting together all of the packages and developing the platform that we want to use for it. We have found that many big internet companies are spamming the market with this type of service, and in general they don’t actually give people a worthwhile product. So, we decided to create a package that actually works! We will continue to make custom websites and encourage people to go that route (since it’s better), but we will also add this new service to our web options.

 

Please stay tuned for more information, and don’t hesitate to contact us if you have questions about what this new service is all about.

 

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Flag Tech Talk Lecture Series

 

We are hard at work planning our upcoming Flag Tech Talk lecture series for next year. We are taking December off due to the Holidays, but will have the lectures continue in January. Stay tuned for announcements about future topics.

 

In the meantime, we have just updated our website to include our Screen Presentations. So, if you missed any of our past lectures, you can now go onto the site and take a look at all the great information and tips we’ve provided during the discussions.

 

Click here to View our Screen Presentations from Past Lectures

 

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New Client Welcome

 

We’d like to welcome the following new clients into the Flagstaff Central web family. Most of these have joined us in the past few months… Some of these clients have brand new websites we’ve created, while others came to us to get things cleaned up, fixed, and marketed properly. We take on all sorts of clients with all sorts of needs!

 

Please take a moment to look at the websites of our New Clients

 

Nature Badge | Flagstaff School of Music | Flagstaff Auctions

Katlon RV & Boat Storage | Ponderosa Medical Waste

Feeding Our Neighbors | A Greener Day Recycling

 

We are always looking for positive referrals, so if you know of someone
who needs a website or internet marketing, please have them give us a call!

 

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Target Sites are On Sale

 

A couple of times a year, we put our Target Site service on sale because we believe it works so well. It’s our way of encouraging you to expand their marketing through an inexpensive process. We have found that the cost vs traffic for this is absolutely worth it!

The Target Site service is essentially creating you a
“one page website” that goes after a very
select Keyword or Phrase in the Search Engines.

 

What we have found is that a full website often buries some of the core information you want for your marketing. Clearly, we do our best to marketa full site, but with so much content the “select keyword” may get lost. So, if we create a single page site that goes after that topic, you can often cash in on this extremely targeted traffic.

Sale Price:
~ $350 initial design fee & search engine submission (normally $500)
~ $23/yr for your new domain
~ $5/ month for hosting

[Any additional Target Sites are "half price" at only $175 each. That's an amazing deal!]

Once this is up and running, you can see that for almost nothing each month you could be getting around 1,000 extra unique visitors per month that are very targeted to your topic!

Click here for more information

 

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Computer Tip for Outgoing Email

 

For those of you using software for your Email like Outlook, Windows Mail, or Thunderbird, we have a good tip if you are ever having problems sending out email through your own email address (that uses your domain extension).

Some of the big Internet Service Providers (ISP) have decided to block email that doesn’t have their own domain extension in it. They are doing this to reduce bandwidth on their system. Often, they simply do a maintenance upgrade, and then all of a sudden your outgoing email won’t go.
If you run into this problem, go into your Email Preferences (typically under Tools / Accounts…). Look under the “Advance Settings” for the section that lists Ports. Your outgoing port is normally set to Port 25 by default. Change this to Port 587.

These big companies often start blocking Port 25, but our email server and many others provide a secondary port that should let things go through! It’s an extra added benefit we provide to give our clients better service!

Of course, if you ever need help with this or any email issues or want to move over to our services, don’t hesitate to contact us. That’s all part of our personalized service! We are here to help!

[Note: This has nothing to do with using WebMail based email.]

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Client Highlights

 

On the Homepage of our city guide (towards the bottom), we regularly highlight banner ads of our clients. It’s one of those things that we can provide to our clients as the “gift of marketing” that get you more exposure through the thousands of visitors we get each month.

The current client banners highlighted are:

 

Blue Sky Counseling | Root Natural Health | Friends of Camp Colton

 

We do everything we can to market out clients to the fullest!

 

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Have a Great Day!

Analyzing Your Website Statistics - A Flag Tech Talk Lecture

This discussion will be all about reviewing your website statistics to see how well your online marketing is going. This is one of the most underused benefits of having a website. No other form of marketing can give you so much information like: how many visitors have you had, how many pages have they looked at, where did they find you, what search words did they use to find you... We will be looking at a number of webstat programs that are standard on most web servers or can be installed into your site like Webalizer, AwStats, Google Analytics, Yahoo/Bing stats, and a few others. Come make better use of your online marketing by learning about your website statistics!

Held on Wednesday, July 18th at 6 p.m. at Kickstand Kafé

Presented by Joe Bodin of Flagstaff Central.com, Inc.
The Flag Tech Talk lecture series are free discussions about technology for regular people.  They are sponsored by Flagstaff Central.com, Inc. and Orig'native LLC. They are held on the 3rd Wednesday of every month and are completely free to the public.  These lectures are designed to help educate regular people so they understand more about computers, the internet, and the resources available to them when it comes to managing their small business or organization. Come armed with questions...!

Go to www.FlagTechTalk.com for more information.

No Techno-Babble Allowed!

Choosing Accounting Software – A Flag Tech Talk Lecture

QuickBooks™ is the most common accounting solution available to small businesses, but it is not the only option. During this discussion, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of using this software as compared to several cloud based solutions. We’ll focus on items to consider when choosing the right software for your business including tips for streamlining your accounting and electronic payment options. This presentation is for the non-accountant. Bring your questions!


Held on Wednesday, June 20th at 6 p.m. at Kickstand Kafé

Presented by Jody Seibert of The Dog Ate My Books
The Flag Tech Talk lecture series are free discussions about technology for regular people.  They are sponsored by Flagstaff Central.com, Inc. and Orig’native LLC. They are held on the 3rd Wednesday of every month and are completely free to the public.  These lectures are designed to help educate regular people so they understand more about computers, the internet, and the resources available to them when it comes to managing their small business or organization. Come armed with questions…!

Go to www.FlagTechTalk.com for more information.

No Techno-Babble Allowed!

All About Android – A Flag Tech Talk lecture

“All About Android”
May 16th at 6 pm at KickStand Kafe
Presented by Bret Carpenter of Orig’native LLC

Android SmartPhone and Tablets… We will be looking at setup, security, and apps that are available in the Android network. The discussion will also cover different business uses that you should be using on your device. Discover the best ways to synch up your device with your Google Account so that you can have your Calendars, Contacts, and Files available to you from your Home, Business and On-The-Go. Feel free to bring your phone or tablet with you to start using your Android correctly right away.

The Flag Tech Talk lecture series are free discussions about technology for regular people.  They are sponsored by Flagstaff Central.com, Inc. and Orig’native LLC. They are held on the 3rd Wednesday of every month and are completely free to the public.  These lectures are designed to help educate regular people so they understand more about computers, the internet, and the resources available to them when it comes to managing their small business or organization. Come armed with questions…!

Go to www.FlagTechTalk.com for more information.

No Techno-Babble Allowed!

Simple Steps to Getting and Maintaining a Website - A Flag Tech Talk Lecture

Join us on Wednesday, April 18th at 6 pm at KickStand Kafé for our next Flag Tech Talk lecture entitled, "Simple Steps to Getting and Maintaining a Website" and presented by Joe Bodin of Flagstaff Central.com, Inc.

This discussion will be about solving how the process of getting a website sometimes feels like a huge task for a small business owner to conquer. The first step is to understand what it takes to get a website. This lecture will outline these steps with helpful tips, some cost concepts, and will help you understand what you will have to do to make this happen. Then, we will also discuss what it will take to be successful in maintaining your site over time, so if you already have a site then you should still attend to see what the long term future holds.

The Flag Tech Talk lecture series are free discussions about technology for regular people.  They are sponsored by Flagstaff Central.com, Inc. and Orig'native LLC. They are held on the 3rd Wednesday of every month and are completely free to the public.  These lectures are designed to help educate regular people so they understand more about computers, the internet, and the resources available to them when it comes to managing their small business or organization. Come armed with questions...!

For more information, go to www.FlagTechTalk.com.

No Techno-Babble Allowed!

Posting Videos into Your Website

We just figured out a nifty way to have YouTube videos automatically feed into a website.  For some odd reason, YouTube doesn't offer this service.  They do give you embed code to put individual videos, but they don't have a simple way to add your whole video feed into your website.

We've had a number of clients who regularly post new videos on YouTube.  Now that people can take a video from a smartphone or webcam, it has unleashed people to make their own quick vids whenever they get inspired. These aren't meant to be that "commercial video" where it is really professional.  They are meant to show the human side of a business or organization while teaching people about what they do...

So, how do you get your YouTube page feeding into your site?

1) Your Feed Address: http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/USERNAME/videos.rss.  Simply put your YouTube user name in the spot that says, "USERNAME" in the link.  You can go to the page - it looks like most RSS feeds.

2) Use FeedBurner: This is a service owned by Google that has a lot of really great features for marketing. The accounts are free and typically if you already have a Google account, you can login with the same account info.  Once you enter, you will see a field that asks you to put in your RSS feed link.  Use the Link above and follow the setup steps on FeedBurner...

3) BuzzBoost:  After you have created your FeedBurner setup, you should then go to "Publicize" and choose "BuzzBoost".  This will allow you to customize the feed to have items you want like a Title, Date/Time, How Many you want Displayed, and you will also need to choose "HTML" as the way you want it displayed.  Then, click "Activate" and it will spit out the code you will need.

4) Add Code into Website:  You would then take the FeedBurner/BuzzBoost code and install it into your website wherever you wish it to appear.

And now, every time you post to your YouTube page with your new video inspiration, it will automatically change out the video(s) on your website within 30 minutes...  Pretty nifty!



Please Note: All of the above may sound like a lot, but it really isn't hard to do at all. Clearly you need to have some understanding of how a RSS feed works, follow basic directions on FeedBurner and BuzzBoost, and then need to be able to install the code into your website.  If you don't have this skill and need some help, just contact us and we can talk about the options and how we can help you out.