We've been making Central.ly better than ever and here's what’s new!

Facebook Group

There's now a Central.ly group on Facebook where other business owners are discussing best tips and practices for their store.

Join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/321859831204241/

You can even get your questions answered right from the Central.ly team. Come check it out and learn from other store owners just like you!

New Email Alerts

You now get real-time updates whenever one of your items hits 20, 50 and 100 views! This helps you know how your items are doing without checking Facebook every few minutes. :) Start posting items to receive the alerts!

Thank you for using Central.ly. We’ll keep pushing to make Central.ly even better!

One of the best ways to show off and sell your products is to take a high quality photo for your customers to see. A great photo can often do more to sell your item than a small description. You don’t need to have a fancy DSRL camera to take awesome photos. The quality in smartphones has risen dramatically in the past year and using an app or two can help give your photo some extra flair.

Just a few tips and apps can get you started and selling items very quickly.

Photography Tips

When taking photographs, it's best to have these tips in mind.

• Focus. Make sure you are focused on the product in mind. When using your phone, you can just tap on the product you'd like to focus on and the phone will take care of the rest.
• Stabilize your arm. Most phones have auto-image stabilization but resting your arm on a table or chair will significantly improve your photo and minimize blur due to motion.
• Lighting. Make sure there is plenty of light on the product. You can do this by opening all the windows in the room or taking the photograph outside. Avoid using the flash on your phone because it will wash out much of the color on your product.

Now that we've got the basics down, let's have some fun with a few apps.

Apps: iPhone

If you're using an iPhone, here are a few great apps that will allow you to take awesome photos for your fans.

Instagram
One of the most popular apps in the Appstore is Instagram. It is fast and fun way to share photos with your fans and adjust their look and feel. Instagram makes it easy to let your products shine and be more alluring to your fans. Download the free app here in the App Store.

Adobe Photoshop Express
Don’t let the name scare you away. Adobe Photoshop for the iPhone is an easy and powerful way to make small adjustments to your item photos. Photoshop Express makes it quick to turns your photos from good to great. Download the free app here in the App Store.

Apps: Android

Camera360 Ultimate
One of the most versatile apps in the Android Marketplace is Camera360 Ultimate. From HDR photos to colorful effects, Camera360 has nearly everything you’d want to bring out something extra in your products. It’s been named one of PC World’s Top 100 Technology products and has support from over 20 million fans around the world. Download the app here.

We hope these simple tips and free apps will give the creative inspiration to post more items on your Facebook page for your fans to see! We want to know, what are your favorite photo apps to use?

Your goal should be to tell never explicitly tell your customers to buy. You should ask yourself, how do I get my customers to ask me how to buy? 

You do this by engaging your customers and then providing awesome photos of your products that leave your customers begging you to buy your product.

To do this, give your Fans interesting things to engage with.  You know what your Fans are into the most.  If they are young women, tell them about the latest fashions. Share funny stories with them. If they are moms, tell them about fun things to do with their children. Tell them how the latest gadget can will make their children smarter or save them time.  And then, while in that process, drop beautiful photos that will make them want to buy. 

Do you want to get engagement? Well here are some tips.

1. Ask questions.

What color do you think this would look best in? Is this is a Friday night out dress or a work dress? What friend do you think this would look best on?

2. Post often and post different types of content.

Have contests, share videos, share jokes, ask questions, share photos, share text. You get the point - Mix it up. The more random you are, the more your audience will engage with you.

3. Take beautiful photos.

You can use filters on your camera phone for added twists. Point and shoot cameras are great for crisp photos. Lastly, there are always stock photos from catalogs you can use as well. 

What are some tips that you have that have worked in terms of getting more engagement?

We are excited to announce that Central.ly has raised funding from 500 Startups, one of the most recognized incubators in the world, and is now a part of the Fall 2011 class. We are moving our offices to the sweet 500 Startups co-working space in Mountain View.

We hustled our butts off to get into 500 Startups (thanks to all the mentors and friends for your support!) and we are glad to be working with some great startups from all over the world.  Almost half of the class is International hailing from Croatia, Estonia, Australia, and Japan to name a few countries.

From a company standpoint, what we are most excited about is the extensive mentor list.  As a team we've made a point to schedule one on one meetings with mentors that can help us all improve our personal  abilities to contribute to Central.ly and thus far it's helped immensely.  For example, just Thursday night, we had an impromptu meeting with a mentor at 9pm that lasted for over an hour and provided much more insight into the problems we are solving. It's impromptu meetings like this that make 500 Startups great.

To our customers, mentors, friends, and family - thanks for all of the support. We are excited about our progress thus far and for what’s next. 

As a small business owner you are focused on driving an increasing amount traffic to your website. Traffic to your website means more leads for your business, which means more ways to sell your product or service to your customers.

One simple way to start driving traffic to your website is by utilizing Social Media by populating all of your social media presences with your website address. Why? Because, believe it or not, that is where a large percentage of your potential customers are searching for you to learn more about your business.

For the purposes of this blog post, I am going to focus on local business social media accounts but the same can be used for online businesses as well.

Facebook Fan Page Example

There are over 500 million users on Facebook. That’s more people then there are in the United States. You can assume that the majority of your customers are on Facebook and that is where they will interact with you. Because of this, it's important you have your website there when they want to find out more about you.

How to add: Log in to your Facebook account and visit your Facebook Page. There you will see the Edit Info box and then all you need to do is click on it and add your website link in the website section.

Twitter Example

Twitter is the best tool available to send short messages to your users so they can learn about your new deals or any updates at your business.

How to add: Log in to your Twitter account and click on the Profile link. There you will see an“edit your site” link where you can easily add your website link.

Google Places  Example

The majority of searches of your business will occur on Google, so you will receive lots of traffic to your Google Places page. To drive that traffic to your website you need to have your web address on your Google Places account.

How to add: Visit your Google Places page, go to “more” then click "edit" to edit the page.

Yelp Example

Yelp is used heavily by local consumers on mobile phones when they are searching for a place to patronize in their current location. Additionally, many of your users will go to Yelp to read reviews about past experiences of customers to learn whether they can trust you. It may be controversial, but Yelp is too big to ignore and you should take control as much as possible.

Foursquare Example

Foursquare is emerging to be a game changer for getting new customers in the door and getting them coming back for more. What's important about Foursquare is that people are interacting with your business on their mobile phones. When they pull up your business on their phone, there is a high chance that they will visit your website to learn more about, so make sure you have a presence there!

Foodspotting  Example

Like Foursquare, where people check in to your venue for perks and fun, if you're a restaurant then people are already taking photos of your food and posting them to Foodspotting. When consumers are walking around your neighborhood looking for a place to eat, they use Foodspotting to find the best food to nom on in the area. If you have your website on your Foodspotting page you are bound to get more traffic to your business from the Foodspotters in the area.

How to add: When you are on the main page of your venue, click on the big photo in the top left corner, then scroll down to the bottom to edit the page. Note: You need to be logged into Foodspotting to see the edit screen. (I did a little screen hack to make both the login screen and the edit link to appear at the same time.)

That's all! 

This guide will help you get more traffic just by maintaining a Social Media profile which will lead more and more people to your business. If you have any questions let us know, and share some of your experiences with social media and how it’s helped you in the comments!

After using the Central.ly website builder to create a site for your business you're likely thinking to yourself "great, now what?" This post aims to give you a run down of the four big things you should do, and a few of the things you shouldn't, to get your website to grow. You want visitors right? Then read on!

1. Pick your domain name. (www.website-name.com)

With Central.ly you automatically have a place for your site at http://central.ly/your_sitename, but using your own domain name makes it easier to promote your site. We are happy to help you set up email addresses on your domain, too.

Visit the “Promote” panel in your site editor to start using your own domain name now. Don’t have a site? Create a website now.

2. Think about who will be visiting your site.

You know what you’re business is about, but your visitors don’t. We have seen sites that mention a lawyer’s wife and dog, but fail to mention the company specializes in family law and operates in San Francisco. If user’s can’t guess where you are or what you do you will lose their business. Information you should include on your site:

• What your business does
• Your city or street address
• Your phone number
• Your business hours

3. Promote your site. For free!

Ask everyone you know, including you, to visit your website and press the facebook like, the google +1 and tweet about the site. Do not pay anyone to do this, but be creative and find ways to get your friends and family to show the respect they have for you by "liking" you. You could throw your own Website Launch party or start a competition for who shares your site the most. A good motto is: if you don't ask you don't get.

4. Promote your site. For pay.

After your friends and family have all promoted your amazing new website, you can take it to the next level with press promotion. Write up a short description of your business and web site, and why it’s important for your community, then have someone help you get it to the press. We have seen good things from PRweb (unaffiliated with Central.ly).

Bonus: Things you should do but Central.ly did for you!

Lucky you, by creating your site at Central.ly we already took care of some of the harder tasks for you, for free, as it should be! These include:

1. Adding your site to google, bing, and other search engines.
2. Making your site facebook, google + and twitter compatible.
3. Setting up your meta data so your site can be found across the web.

You're Done!

That's all you need to know to start getting visitors to your site! Check back at the Central.ly blog when we go into more detail about how to promote your website.

Have ideas we left out? Let us know in the comments! Just found this article and interested in using the Centrally website builder? Sign up to use Central.ly for free.

Central.ly is now in the Google Chrome Web App Store! If you've used Central.ly for your business be sure to visit the Store and write a short positive review about us for being such a great website builder. While you are there give us a +1 and 5 stars!

Being in the Chrome Web App Store now makes it easy for small businesses who are searching for tools for their business to find us and easily add our app to their Chrome Web App collection.

Context: We receive validation for what we are building from potential customers, current customers, competitors, blogs, and news stories quite often. I am taking it upon myself to start sharing this information with all of you to share with your friends. 

Additional Context: We offered free website classes to local entrepreneurs to help them get online and learn from them in the process.

Here is an email we received yesterday today.

----------------------

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 7:47 PM, xxxxxxx wrote:

Hi Chris,

Are there any time slots left for your website help for XXXXX students?  Are there web hosting fees associated with the site?

Thank you,

xxxxx

415.xxx.xxxc

From: Chris Bennett <chris@central.ly>
To:xxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2011 7:50 PM

Subject: Re: Website Building for xxxxxx's xxxxx

Hi xxxxx,

We are booked but we plan to do this again shortly so stay tuned.  No, no hosted fees.

Chris

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 8:20 PM, xxxx xxx <xxxxx@yahoo.com> wrote:

Oh, too bad I missed this time around.  Please keep me posted if there are any cancellations.  I live in the neighborhood. 

I'm getting ready to open my business in about three weeks, and I'm trying to use the Weebly site, but it's been a bit challenging.

Thank you,

xxxxx xxxx

415.xxx.xxx