Although I had to drive about 200 miles round trip to Boston last month, it was worth it and I’d do it again. I belong to the New England Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists. We call it simply NEAPG. That’s a lot easier to get off your tongue! As a matter of fact, I happen to be this year’s vice president. It seems to be just like Joe Biden, who doesn’t seem to have a lot of “real” responsibilities, he just has to try to stay out of trouble!
The big focus for me today was a presentation by fellow genealogist, Marian Pierre-Louis. She’s well suited to today’s subject matter which had to do with marketing your website: Getting focused, making a business plan, using the internet to your advantage and, my biggest mystery, social media.
Last week, the membership was asked to volunteer their websites for Marian’s critique at today’s meeting. Since I just rehashed my own, I wanted to get someone who knows a whole lot more than I do about such mysteries to help me get it polished up. I had no idea how many offered their sites or if she’d pick mine.
website ideas (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
Well, she picked 3 sites, largely because I think that only 3 people offered to participate. Luckily, my site was one of the 3. Well, I learned a great deal about structuring my web site. Truth be known, I had already done a lot of things right! But she had some very helpful insights to tweak it up. For example, she thought I had too many pages, visitors would have to click too many times to get to what I wanted them to see. So, tonight, and it’s well after midnight, I just finished restructuring the largest part of what she suggested I do. I’ve got a few more issues to remedy.
But I was particularly glad that she covered blogs, Facebook, Twitter and a couple of other social media issues. I’m not ready to talk much about it tonight. But I plan on re-reading my notes, tweaking all the sites where I want a presence and watching to see if it impacts the results. Then I can talk about what she suggested, what I did and how well it worked.
I will say that after the first week or so of working this new site, I contracted with a new client out of California. I asked the client, for the sake of knowing which marketing was working for me, how did they find me. They said they simply searched Google for a professional genealogist in this area and my site popped up first!! Not bad for an amateur webmaster!
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