Cake Media Turns One!

Cake Media turns one this week, happy birthday (cakeday?) to us!

We have learned a lot over the last 12 months, as we’ve navigated the ups and downs of being a brand new business, not to mention wearing the many hats it requires. From accountant, to human resources department to contract negotiator to social media manager, graphic designer, editor, photographer and more, we do it all. It has been an interesting learning curve to say the least.

However, more than anything, the last year has been FUN. Being able to do what we love and to work together (in Maui!) as sisters, it really doesn't get better than that.

Not to mention, we have connected and worked with some incredible individuals and companies here on the island and we feel incredibly privileged to have had the opportunity to do so.

Thank you so much to all our clients, family and friends who have helped and supported us in getting Cake Media off the ground. We couldn't have done it without your words of advice, cups of coffee, child and dog sitting, patience, encouragement, slices of cake, referrals and—it would be remiss of us not to mention—your likes, shares and follows on social media.

We have made so many great relationships over the last year and we can’t wait to see what comes next.

Thank you for visiting our site and here’s to the next year of Cake Media!

Laura and Jenny

Instagram: New 'Likes' and Comment Control

Instagram announced more changes yesterday, with a range of comment control features that are intended to make the social media platform a “welcoming place for everyone.”

As seen in Tuesday’s blog from Instagram co-founder and CEO, Kevin Systrom, users now have the ability to like individual comments and—as the feature rolls out throughout the week—you may notice that each comment now has a heart next to it.

As Systrom wrote, “Liking lets you show support and encourages positivity throughout the community.”

From a social media marketing point of view, this is a great time-saving and engagement-building feature. Some Instagram comments certainly call for an individual response, especially when it comes to customer service queries. However, when you simply want to acknowledge a comment or show your appreciation to a fellow user, you can now tap the heart icon in much the same way that you’d give the thumbs-up on Facebook, double tap an image or ‘like’ a tweet.

The photo-sharing platform has also introduced a way of turning comments off on any post, allowing the image to stand on its own and removing the opportunity for cyberbullying and offensive remarks. Trolls, zero. Instagram, one.

Users can also now remove followers from their private accounts, without blocking them and without notification. As Systrom added, “In the past, once you approved a follower, there was no simple way to undo that decision without blocking them. Going forward, if your account is private, you can remove followers by going to your list of followers and tapping the … menu next to any person’s name.”

There’s more. Another addition to Instagram comments is the ability to anonymously report self-harm posts—connecting people who may need help with helplines and organizations that can offer support.

Making the internet a more welcoming place, taking on online harassment and adding another way to engage with fellow users, we are all in favor of Instagram’s latest changes.

Released this week, the new features should now be available to you. Engage and enjoy!

Thanks for visiting, Laura and Jenny

SEO Work For Aric Becker Photography

It has been such a pleasure to work with Maui photographer Aric Becker in recent weeks. 

He is an excellent sports, commercial, editorial and portrait photographer, who relocated to Maui from Seattle in 2013. 

For Aric and family, a move across the Pacific brought about plenty of changes, including the need to start his established photography business again from the ground up.

Golfer Jordan Rodgers, shot by Aric Becker on Maui in April, 2016.

When Aric approached us to inquire about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services for his website, www.aricbecker.com, we were excited to help him continue with the growth of his Maui business.

For those who may not be familiar with SEO, in short, it is a way of combining a range of creative and technical techniques to improve organic (unpaid) search engine rankings. The goal is to increase the visibility of a website, rank higher on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing and, ultimately, to bring in more site traffic and paying customers.

At Cake Media, our client work will always begin with an informal chat and we met with Aric several times over coffee to discuss our services, strategy and to examine the existing content on his site. Once we had a clear idea of what he wanted and how we could help, we delivered a bespoke proposal, outlining our plans for increasing SEO.

Aric is great at getting out there, shooting a wide variety of subjects and cross-marketing on social media. His easy-to-navigate site already had a wealth of high-quality visual content, including shots from portrait sessions, editorial work and photography from local sporting events such as The Maui Invitational (basketball), The Hyundai Tournament of Champions (golf) and the NFL Pro Bowl (football).

However, after completing a full audit of Aric’s site, we knew that we could be of assistance in several areas. 

We started with Jenny working on the technical side of things, including research, development and implementation of keyword strategy, adding and/or optimizing URL slugs, title tagging and more.

Meanwhile, Laura began work on content development. Creating unique written content is something that we love to do and It so important to have fresh, error-free, readable copy with relevant keywords on your site. It offers an insight into you and your business, makes for a much better user experience and, done the right way, will drastically improve your search engine rankings. 

After interviewing Aric, we rewrote his Bio to tell the story of how he became a photographer.  He has a great story by the way, you can check it out here.

We also created a new FAQ page, where site users could easily discover the answers to any immediate questions. This also gave us the opportunity to work in more relevant keywords, to tell prospective customers more about Aric's work and, of course, to encourage users to spend longer navigating around the site.

Then we began the process of working back through Aric’s blogs, dating back to January 2015. We increased the length of the posts, edited the spelling and grammar, added in more background information and—you guessed it—worked in those all-important keywords.

As with any SEO project, this is not a fast process and requires plenty of updates and staying on top of keyword trends. We'll be revisiting Aric's site many times in the coming days and weeks to analyze the effects of our work and to adjust aspects of our strategy accordingly.

Do you need help with SEO? Don't know where to start? Get in touch with us today and we can help!

Thank you for visiting, Laura and Jenny

Emojis, Engagement and the Release of iOS 10

Apple announced at a press conference marking the launch of the iPhone 7 this week that iOS 10 will officially be released on September 13, 2016.

So, not only are we in store for shiny new iPhones with wireless AirPod headphones, advanced camera options, water and dust resistance and more—we are also going to get a and a host of new features as part of Apple’s updated operating system. This includes new emojis.

Love them or hate them, emojis are here to stay and from a social media marketing point of view, they can be a valuable tool for increasing engagement and communicating with your online communities.

Emojis can speak to your audiences across language barriers, they also convey tone, which can often be misinterpreted online and via text. They can also make your brand appear friendlier, funnier, and up-to-date with younger followers.

Studies have even indicated that internet users respond to emojis because they resonate on an emotional level. We kid you not, neuroscientists have actually studied the effects of emoticons and emojis on the human brain and have found that we respond to these smiley faces in the same way that we would with a human face. 

If you aren't already using emojis in your social media marketing campaigns, give them a try. You'll be amazed at the boost in engagement levels.

So, what are we getting with these new emojis? Diversity tops the list. As seen recently on Apple.com, “Apple is working closely with the Unicode Consortium to ensure that popular emoji characters reflect the diversity of people everywhere.”

We’ll see female police officers, firefighters and construction workers, dancing men with bunny ears, single parent families, female basketball players, the Rainbow Flag and much more, as seen on Emojipedia. The new-look emojis will also have a better, updated design, will be slightly larger and will also feature more animals, sports, facial expressions, food and drinks. Lovers of bacon, who don’t have the inclination to type out b-a-c-o-n, your emoji is almost here…

DID YOU KNOW?

The word "Emoji" has nothing to do with emotions, it means "picture character" in Japanese

Emojis are different to Emoticons, which look more like this :-( and :-)

July 17 is World Emoji Day

This emoji 😂 was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year for 2015 (!!!)

Nearly half of all comments and captions on Instagram contain emoji characters

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That's it for today's blog. Thanks so much for visiting our site and have fun with those new emojis!

Laura and Jenny

SEO services for rodrigo moraes photography

We are thrilled to announce that Rodrigo Moraes Photography is Cake Media’s latest client.  

Rodrigo Moraes is a Maui-based photographer, who specializes in shooting destination weddings and family portraits. We love his work, so needless to say we were delighted when he came to us looking for search engine optimization help for his website, www.rodrigomoraesphotography.com

For those of who who may not know, search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of using a number of creative and technical techniques to improve search engine rankings. The goal is to increase the visibility of a website and to bring in more traffic.

For any independent professional or online business, high rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are crucial when it comes to hooking potential paying customers. 

After a complete audit of Rodrigo’s site, we began by meeting with him several times to talk strategy and to find out more about his work and style of photography. We also delivered and discussed a tailor-made proposal, outlining our SEO plans for his business. 

We found that Rodrigo's site was content rich in so many ways; plenty of beautiful photographs, great use of video, a blog, plus social follow buttons for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.

However, it was clear to us that there were areas in which Cake Media could add to and adjust the existing content to boost SEO.

Aside from providing services for the technical side of SEO (think meta tags, sitemaps, eliminating crawl errors, Google Adwords and so on), there’s nothing we love more than creating fresh written content. 

We can’t stress the importance of good content enough. It encourages users to spend longer on your site, it can help them to find all the information they need without navigating away and—our ultimate goal—it will keep them coming back for more.

Any content on your site needs to be consistent, trustworthy and it should convey the personality of your brand. This is exactly why we wanted to spend time getting to know Rodrigo, so we could take on his “voice” when developing copy.

We aren’t about keyword stuffing, we’re all about creating well-formatted, reader-friendly content with the short and long-tail keywords carefully worked in. So far, we have already edited and rewritten sections of Rodrigo’s blog, we have penned a new About page, added in FAQs and Testimonials from previous clients, with lots more SEO strategy happening behind the scenes (we can’t tell you all our secrets).

We must warn you, SEO is not a fast process. It’s something that requires a great deal of patience and it’s easy to see why a lot of business owners may not have time to do things on their own.

That’s where we come in. 

Please feel free to contact Cake Media with any questions and we’d be more than happy to help!

Thanks for visiting, Laura and Jenny