Do Your Clients See a Blank Screen
When They Type In Your Domain?

Gulf Coast Internet Can Help You With

	Creating and Maintaining Websites Choosing and registering domain names Full website design, re-design and maintenance, including logo and/or graphic work Set up a blog Search engine optimization (SEO) Keyword review and assessment Set up email addresses & email forwarding
	Internet Marketing Implementation Submit articles to online article banks Submit press releases to online press release services Set up and running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns Design an email newsletter template Broadcast an email newsletter or email marketing campaign Implement a full Internet Marketing Campaign for your products and services
	Shopping Carts & Ecommerce Set up your shopping cart Integrate your shopping cart with your website Maintain your mailing list
	Education & Brainstorming We maintain your websites or we teach you how to maintain them yourself Brainstorming around marketing plans and implementation; coming up with creative solutions Click here to see our amazing prices on web design and maintenance!

Twitter. Facebook. Search Engines. Social Media. What does it all mean?

Social Media Marketing has been  growing in the past few years. Some online businesses don’t even bother with any type of search engine marketing – they choose instead to focus their efforts to create their spot on major Social Media Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Myspace, etc…

If you serious about your online marketing, having a solid presence in social media is a must! If you don’t have the knowledge nor the time to achieve it, we can help.

Why you should consider doing Social Media marketing, and why should you choose us to do the work:

1. It’s natural. Not only do you get organic linking without obvious patterns, your website is exposed to large groups of people in a random fashion. This differs from paid advertising which has in-your-face commercial sales tactics.
2. It’s defensible. Social communities can be a great source of traffic, on top of any web traffic you are already receiving from search engines. Its difficult to easily increase your search engine traffic, but social media traffic can be easily controlled through strategic marketing.
3. It’s low-cost/high returns. If done by yourself, costs are limited to only time and perhaps the expenses involved in hiring a freelance programmer/designer. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of dollars to buy many links; social media has the ability to give you that for free.
4. It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific, not interfering with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines.

Strategy…

Social Media Marketing is the toughest form of Marketing. Sure, it’s easy to just setup an account here and there and yak with random people, but it’s certainly not as easy to engage the right individuals, in a way that they will befriend you, follow you, trust you and eventually evangelize their friends for you!

Professional Social Media Marketing is a strategy game, and depending on how you play your cards, the power of the masses can play for, or against you. At GCIS, we follow these strict steps for every new SMO project, to make sure that your initiative “goes viral” in the good way…

1. Analyse the networks : we scan the networks and find the most appropriate ones for your niche market.
2. Set Goals / Benchmarks: what do you want to achieve? What results do you expect from your SMO initiative?
3. Find Groups and Communities: inside the social networks, we seek out the groups and communities where your target audience is gathering
4. Develop and Rollout: do you have any Content to share? Interesting and useful content is key to capture your users’ interest.
5. Identify your fans / Influencers in the community: some will be more active than others in your fan pages, groups and blogs. Those individuals should be rewarded in order to turn them into evangelizers for your brand. This is when the true word-to-mouth starts!
6. Offer giveaways / Develop incentives to attract more people and eventually generate more word-to-mouth. Whether it be an ebook, a t-shirt, a coupon or any kind of virtual gift, incentives are important to make people come back and talk about your brand to their friends.
7. Engage and facilitate conversations by asking questions, launching polls, quizzes, sweepstakes.
8. Measure results and adapt the strategy based on what worked and what didn’t.

Email Gulf Coast Internet Services to see how we can help you start a solid Social Media initiative for your business.

You had the best intentions.

You were going to learn to use that gi-normous box of software you paid a fortune for, when you intended to create that super-duper website for your company or yourself. Never mind the instructions look like they are written in some language from a bad Star Trek episode (and not even STNG) …

You had the best of intentions. Then, reality sets in. Not only have you not written one word of code, you can’t figure out how to install the software. Or even where to put the CD in the computer…

If this sounds like you, stop there, and sign up with us on a web maintenance contract. We don’t have to be the creators of your site, but its far cheaper on you for us to maintain it on a monthly basis than to FIX it once its hacked to death.

Getting into the coding, updating, and management of a website is a career all its own. Your time is stretched thin enough already. If you are in business, you’re are busy running your business, managing employees, tracking incoming and outgoing stock, and finding new customers and clients to pay for it all, right? Let us handle the website. You handle your business.

Creating a website with the guidance of a professional, trained consultant is supposed to be a pretty pleasant experience. You work together to create a site that serves the business – not the other way around. The site reflects the company goals and direction, and steers potential clients or information seekers through your bricks and mortar doorway, or to your online store. Once your site is up, however, the dragon rears its head.

“I want to maintain the site myself! I don’t want to pay you to do it.”

Many clients have called us over the years wanting to “try their hand” at maintaining their own site, only to call back in tears, frustrated that they can’t figure it out. We spend countless hours on “tech support” calls, all on our own time, trying to calm, to educate, and to fix.

Many people call us, all hours, day and night, and weekends, wanting to know how to do something, or fix something, they broke that originally worked correctly. Nine times out of ten, when we tell them to do a general command such as “copy this text here, go down and paste it there”, the clients say “I don’t know how to do that!”

Well. Here’s an example. You go out and buy a Chevy Duramax Diesel truck. Nice truck, nice price. You get it home, drive it awhile, and decide you want to change out some system for something cooler/faster/better you heard about. So you pull the truck under a tree, get out your handy little four piece Dollar Store tool kit, and go at it. Strange, your new shiny truck won’t start. Worse than that, it caught on fire! You call the Chevrolet Dealer and tell him you want him to come fix this truck… it was running fine when you bought it! Guess what the dealer would say….????

Same here. We spend many many manhours (and WOMAN hours) creating your site, making it perfect for your vision, your market, your products, your clients. If you are not comfortable with the basics of running a computer (actually for web creation/maintenance you need far more than basics), and if you don’t have the correct tools (software), you need to leave the tinkering to us.

Contact us today and set up your website maintenance contract. We’ll both get more sleep.

Still want to do it on your own? Community colleges and evening adult education classes usually offer web design and coding classes.

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes — including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

I hear it alot.

“Where’s my website?”

MIA…
Nine times out of ten, your website is under construction, being held up. Why?

95% of web clients don’t supply the needed information: graphics, copy, and other pieces materially necessary to create a great website. When we agree to take the time to do your website, that moment starts a process of a million little pieces.  The domain has to be purchased. The domain has to point to our servers. The domain has to have hosting. Which package is best? What type of website suits the business, a CMS site or an HTML site? Who is the audience…… yadda yadda. Even the most simple site is a huge process, and one that takes meticulous planning, intrinsic thought on som many levels, and proper follow up.

Getting your pieces in order, such as photography, marketing descriptions, price lists, etc. all help speed up the process. If pieces are MIA, the project is put on hold.

Time Oh Give Me Time…
We probably don’t need to subject you to a lame Boy George song to drive home the point that all the million pieces of a website takes time. GCIS and Column Group Media try to price our services low enough for our area, but at the same time, clients must understand we are working on multiple projects at once. Exclusivity, as with any industry, costs more. We can be bought, however. Call us and show us the money!

The average website creation takes at least a month, from first client meeting to something up on the server. A good website is truly never done, it is a living breathing document that showcases your business, and changes with the reflection of your marketing philosophy.

Full complement of internet services – web hosting, design, SEO, branding and marketing.

Working on our own website for once! Please check back. If you need to log in to your client area, please click on the link below.

http://www.gulfcoastinternetservices.com/clients

Writing and preparing content for the Web requires a different approach from writing and preparing content for print documents and publications. In addition, writing copy for the Web that grabs attention and gets the results you want takes special skill and attention, whether you’re trying to sell products or services at a business or commercial site or if you just want to let people know the latest at your personal site.

With seventeen years experience in music marketing and promotion, we can make your indie project look and sound like the “big boyz”. Not many other firms can say that.

Online marketing, combined with real-world buzz, networking and good old fashioned hype can create the image you need to be heard – and seen – above the roar.