A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Do you have a picture that you’d like to add to your website or Facebook page?  Is it a great picture?  Maybe it’s good but needs a little work?

Microsoft Office Picture Manager allows you to quickly crop, compress and resize photos. It comes with all Microsoft Office Suites.  If you don’t have Microsoft Office installed on your computer you can find a free program on-line that will suit your needs.  Both GIMP and Picasa can be downloaded for free and have many photo editing options.     If you would prefer not to download a program from the internet there are also free on-line photo editing programs available such as Pixlr and PicMonkey.  On-line photo storage sites such as Flickr and Photobucket usually have editing capabilities as well.

Experienced users will probably fare well with Pixlr while novices may want to start out with PicMonkey. 
Below is a screen shot of PicMonkey with a photo uploaded ready for editing.  As you can see the blossoms are not centered in the photo and there is some distracting plant material in the upper right hand corner.

Clicking on the crop button opens a few options.  Notice the cropping pane that also opens on the photo.

It’s simple to place the cursor on the pane and move it until it is centered over the part of the photo you would like to keep.  Pull on the outer frame of the cropping pane to make it larger or push in to shrink it.  When you’re satisfied that the size is right and that everything you want in the final photo shows within the cropping pane, click on the apply button.  

Now you have a picture that shows your customers only what you want them to see.

If you don’t want to write a paragraph to go with the picture a few more keystrokes may tell the story for you.

In a few minutes you have a picture to share with your customers that will tell the story you want.

Do you use Google Analytics? You should.

Wow, long time, no blog. Sorry that my welcome post and, this, my first official post had such a time lapse in between! I'll try harder from here on in.

Let's chat about Google Analytics. Even if you are concerned that Google is taking over the world, you should care about Google Analytics. Why? Because it can tell you a lot about the people who are visiting your website, what words they are using to search for you, where your referrals are coming from, and if the marketing program you just put in place is working.

It's a free service offered by Google and can be accessed by a gmail email account (yes, it is all integrated!) at http://www.google.com/analytics/

You can add your website and click for a snippet of HTML coding specific to your URL, which you add to your website code (they give instructions on where to place it). If you are using Wordpress, there are lots of sites out there that can help you add analytics to your site.

Once the code is added, it may take a day or two to activate. After that, you can log in to the Google Analytics site and see so much more meaningful information that past hit and visit counters just can't compete with.

Here's a good snapshot of what you'll see when you get there.

To be able to see the pages people are leaving your site, where in the US, Canada or Europe the majority of your visits are coming from, that the facebook ad you just started using it working since referrals from facebook are up and the page you sent them has increased hits - all great to know.

Trust me, add it to your site, and poke around. The wealth of information there will help you as a sprouting marketer. Knowledge is power. Free knowledge like this is a gift.

Until next time,
Lynne

Welcome!

Welcome to the Sprouting Marketer Blog, a place where producers doing their own marketing, or producers selling directly to consumers, can find tips and learn some new ways (hopefully!) of marketing that doesn't cost an arm and a leg!