On a serious note, I finally got around to announcing some great news–Intelligent Clout has partnered up with Kartogram, a UK-based web application design and development company.

If you have worked with us in the past, you know that our strongest suite always was web marketing, including, but not limited to, idea marketing, content development, press releases and online visibility. We also enjoyed building websites that boost our clients’ web presence. However (and I’m not afraid to admit it), design usually came second. Again, I can go on and defend the notion that ideas, content and traffic in the search engine dominated world trumps “cute” design, but I got to admit I was a little bit worried about our performance in the design area.

No more worries! Kartogram brings expertise, edge and professionalism to our design department. What does it mean to our existing and future clients? Cool, cute, ferocious, outrageous, functional, unsurpassed, memorable–you name it–web design!

We have an exclusive agreement with these guys and  special pricing for American clients. Do not hesitate to contact us at Intelligent Clout and discuss your goals. The partnership makes us a truly one-stop shop for your web application design and development, as well as your online visibility needs!

However, we’ve also been building and promoting websites, as always. Here’s our newest “child”, just set free: www.damiconstruction.com.

Over the course of past year or so I’ve realized that he and my grandmother (think of the old saying about a cobbler’s children going shoeless–she liked to repeat this one) were right. While developing and updating countless blogs for our customers, none of members of Intelligent Clout had time to update our own blog. Link building and article marketing… forget it. We have something more serious and urgent to do.

What exactly? Well, raising someone else’s kids.

Oh, and Happy New Year! It’s only middle of March, so its still perfectly acceptable to wish everybody a nice start of the year, is it not? Just noticed even a decent Season’s Greerings missing from our blog…

And of course the first thing I say to my customers is consistency, consistency, consistency.

So, just to clear things up, we’ve been pretty successful in developing websites and building their content simultaneously; working as a team to make our clients’ brand visible online and doing everything in our power and beyond to position them as experts. We’ve been not very successful addressing our clients’ concerns in our blog as well as letting the world know what we’re up to.

So, in the middle of March, let it be our New Year resolution. More blogging and more updates. Stay tuned and see how we’re going to succeed in following through.

On the same note, if you do have some kids needing good care, we’re the people to contact. Yes, right now, today, before you have next cup of coffee and before you pick up your “real”  kids from school.

By abandoned virtual kids I mean websites that have been done in flash and neglected by Google; websites that have only home page, About Us page with one paragraph and a Contact Us page with company’s address; websites that desperately need some traffic; squeeze pages that do not squeeze a single lead; Google Adwords campaigns that drain your budget and fail to bring customers;  or any similar brats. Let us be your Supper Nanny!

We’ve  been very successful working with folks who dread to give their business cards because of what their prospective customers or business partners might run into doing a Google search on them. Whether it’s negative information or scary nothingness, Intelligent Clout is here for you.

Intelligent Clout Inc. received such a letter last week. Even though being online marketers we understand this is primarily a marketing move on Google’s part in order to drive more interest to their Business Local service, it is flattering indeed.

From our own web analytics results we can see that you, our current and potential customers, friends and partners, search and find us on the Internet all the time. Especially during this holiday season we would like to thank all of you for your support and for the continuous dialogue we are privileged to have with you all year long, online as well as offline.

2009 has been great to us, we look forward to 2010 as we have much more in store for our customers and partners. As long as we all enjoy what we’re doing, no goal is beyond our reach!

P.S. One small suggestion to the biggest partner of anybody who’s online–Google. The little thingy they send with the appreciation letter which you supposedly can stick on your window so your customers would see you are the Favorite Place on Google looks kind of ugly. Seriously, Google could have done a better job designing something people are expected to stick on their storefronts. Have you gotten one of these? What do you think about it?

Kiran Ramineni, founder of SendeaZy.com

Have you ever tried to send an email with a large attachment and somehow the mail just sits in the outbox for a very long time and just doesn’t get sent out successfully?

This is a common problem as your large file is being uploaded to the mail server. For some mail servers, there is a size limitation, which does not allow any file larger than a predetermined size to be uploaded.

One of the most frustrating experiences when sending large files is to wait for minutes or hours only to find out that your email attachment bounced or your FTP transfer has timed out. The failure of large file transfers can cost you and your clients hundreds of dollars in lost productivity, not to mention a bruised reputation with your customers and partners.

Our friend Kiran Ramineni, a founder of sendeaZy.com recently presented the challenges involved in sending and receiving large computer files and how he stumbled upon finding a solution that’s easy for everyone’s use and secure enough to transact information using the internet.

You can check his product out at his website: http://sendeaZy.com. I only wanted to mention a couple of cool features that makes me give this product thumbs up.

First of all, it works on PC, Mac, Linux or any other OS on the planet. Secondly, this is the only piece of application I am aware of that lets you pause the transfer and later resume it at exactly same place where you left it.

So if you are in the middle of a transfer of 50GB movie and you must shut down your PC and go to a meeting, you can easily do so and finish the transfer next day.

Kiran and his friends will be speaking at John Barleycorn in Wrigleyville Thursday, December 10th @ 6:30pm.

Non-members love attending MEF networking events because of great opportunity to meet and network with awesome people– all the cool kids usually show up.

You get to see and talk to speakers of previous MEF events and many of the members of this great organization.

Whether you are an established entrepreneur or someone just pondering about the upsides and downsides of being your own boss, this is the place to find out for real.

Your fear might vanish as you  get a tremendous support and tons of free advice from MEF members who are respected and successful businesspeople.

Come out, bring your friends and let’s all have a great time!

For online registration, please go to: www.MidwestEntrepreneursForum.Org AND CLICK ON CALENDAR OF EVENTS AND SELECT NETWORKING EVENT.

We’ll be there to say hi to all of you too!

More about it here>>>>

Jacqueline Ruiz, Make-it-happen Director at JJR Marketing Consultants.

Really, that’s her title on her business card.

Jacqueline Camacho-Ruiz gave an excellent talk on her amazing carreer that led her from Mexico City to Chicago.

The event as organized by Midwest Entrepreneurs’ Forum and took place in Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Wheaton.

All too often we hear how hard it is to develop a business here in Illinois from native born Americans. A Mexican born entrepreneur Jacqueline Camacho-Ruiz presented her story of how she overcame obstacles on her journey to entrepreneurial excellence.

An entrepreneur with proven abilities in marketing, sales and business communications, Jackie brings a rare ability to transfer her own experiences as a young Hispanic to business plans and materials that allow her clients to reach both the 20-something and Latino audiences, among others.

It’s fun, you feel instant gratification of “getting online” and becoming visible to millions of eyeballs. All you need is sit back and wait for dollars to start flooding your house through windows and chimney.

And if you are not on Facebook, it means people will start thinking you are a monster with hair growing on your nails. Even worse, you are old, worthless and boring, so, yeah, not only you, but your business must be on Facebook by tonight.

Really? Probably not.

Sooner or later (usually sooner) business owners realize no one is interested in their group on Facebook or what they have to say on Twitter. “Dow is down xxx points”. “Dow is up yyy points”. This is what I usually see on an average business Twitter account, for instance. B-o-r-i-n-g!

Who is going to read that, let alone to respond? Every news website on the planet is updating you every minute about the state of Dow, why would somebody want to read this on your Twitter?

Most businesses have no time to promote themselves online, and promotion is really what Facebook and LinkedIn are about. On the top of it, there are so many different ways to promote yourself online that Facebook or Twitter is just a tip of an iceberg.

And why do you need to promote yourself online? Oh, sales, right. Everyone wants some of that. Isn’t it what social networking gurus promised you at the beginning of the seminar? Sign up for Facebook and you will see you sales go through the roof. This is so good for your business. Everyone is doing it!

Or maybe they have warned you: “Signing up for Facebook does not mean you’ll make more money. You have to update your account. Content is king”.

Yes it is, but did they tell you what content? Where to get it from and what to avoid? Are their interested in learning about your clients? Your target market? After all, about you?

Remember what Warren Buffet told? If everyone is doing same thing, it probably means you should do something else.

Yes, you do need to utilize social networking sites, but your ultimate goal online should be visibility, positive image and more sales. Just signing up for Facebook or even regularly updating your account does not mean you will have all of that.

You need a uniform strategy. You need to communicate clear message. You need to know how to craft good pieces of content, where to place them, how to link them and how to diminish the impact of negative reviews/content in general.

When an owner of a solvent business tells me he knows all of that and he has time to handle it, I just shake my head in disbelieve.

Do you do all taxes for your company too? Do you represent your company in court yourself? So why would you want to do all the online marketing and visibility yourself? Because you think marketing is easy? Then why Kim Kardashian is still on TV and your daughter, who has much better looks and some brain too, barely gets a role in a school play? Maybe it has something to do with marketing?

And, please, don’t exclude the online world. Everything what is being said or shown about KK on the Internet is as important as her pictures in glossy magazines. Considering that 383 magazine titles have disappeared in North America this year, we just might want to give another thought about which is more important…

Finally, the testing stage is over and we are ready to deliver! That’s right, if you are:

1) new company wanting to enter the market with a blast;

2) established entity ready to present something new;

3) a company ready to start a blog (somehow never got to it, hmm…)

this is for you!

We will prepare a supercharged online marketing plan what will specifically involve setting up a new blog and doing all the content creation and update. We guarantee that in 3 weeks you will rank among 5 top sites for a handful of long tail keywords and your website traffic will increase  by at least 50 percent. Otherwise, blog is yours to keep for no charge at all!

This also applies for “dead” blogs, the ones that are abandoned and do not generate any significant traffic to your landing pages/home pages.

After 3 weeks have past and your are satisfied with the results, you can keep working on the blog yourself and get even more traffic, or can talk to us about how the blog could be just a start of the most successful marketing campaign you’ve ever ran.

Gives us a buzz or shoot an email and start growing your business today!

Unfortunately, computer wizards will not help you there. You need to figure out how to tell a compelling story about your company and how to get that story in front of a crowd that cares to listen. This is not what normally IT or SEO (search engine optimization) people do.

More than anything else, Google loves original content. Not the stuff you ‘borrowed’ from another website, not something you bought for $5 online that is so impersonal and mangled, it’s hard to tell whether it was written by a real English speaking person, or a machine.

Even though aesthetically appealing website is a must, a lot of technically outdated and visually unattractive websites often rank much higher on Google than shiny flashy pieces of art with no original content.

If you are not the writer type or you do not have time for that, look for outside help. Try to hire somebody who is more than just a good copywriter. The ideal candidate might be a boutique PR and online marketing firm that can give you a lot of personal attention. If your company is a little bigger than mom-and-pop shop, you need somebody who is able to think strategically, who can interview key people in your company and literally get the juicy information out.

Whoever will be doing it, they need to integrate the content in your current website or blog. They also have to make a decisions on what to use outside the website, what press members and bloggers to contact, where to post the original content and where to link it back.

Remember, every company has a story, but only a few are able to tell that story in a compelling way and get it out to the world quickly and efficiently.