As the Web world continues to evolve every day, Astek moves right along with it. While we offer a wealth of services related to newer Web strategies and tools such as social media, good old fashioned websites are still alive and strong.

Sometimes it can be hard to know where to begin if you’ve been given the task of redesigning your company’s website. Having been through this process numerous times, I’ve shared some of my own thoughts and good articles I’ve read recently that can help you through the earliest stages of redesigning your website.

Write your Website Redesign RFP (Request for Proposal)

Like most shopping expeditions, you will find the best product or service for you if you know what you’re looking for ahead of time. This starts by drafting a document of your requirements, which are unique to you. This will help you define your objectives and come to the table with a clear roadmap.

I’ve sometimes found myself in the position of helping prospective clients write their RFPs, whether or not we get the work in the end. I’ve been on both sides of this, and find that working through the RFP with someone who has been through it before can help you immensely.

The most important thing your RFP should do is clearly outline all the parameters of the project to structure it for your vendors so that you can align the format of the proposals you receive. The more specific your requirements, the easier it will be for you to compare quotes. Comparing apples to apples will help ensure you’re picking the right vendor for the right reasons.

RFPs take on numerous forms, but the basics should include project overview, goals, services requested, key roles, expected formats, special requirements, technical requirements, existing integration points, submission details and timelines. For extra credit, you can also create a site map, which is a bullet list or flow chart of the expected pages on your website.

Read more about creating a Web RFP from MarketingProfs. (Free account required for full article)

Read Seven Tips for Improving Your Website from Entrepreneur.com’s Daily Dose.

Illustration by Matthias Pfluegner

Choose the Right Partner for You

Not all Web vendors are the same. They range from individuals to large agencies. With so many options, it’s less a distinction of good and bad and more a matter of alignment with your culture, goals, work style, capabilities, and budget. Some Web professionals focus purely on design. Others do design and development and perhaps hosting. As agencies grow larger they tend to offer more services such as strategic marketing and ongoing campaign development. Full-service boutique agencies like Astek are rarer.

Your RFP will help align the formats of the proposals you receive, which will make them easier to compare. If you didn’t get very far with your RFP, never fear. A good Web consulting firm will be able to guide you through the process. It just might take a little longer to get there. Most websites don’t tend to do a whole lot on their own, so you should consider how this will fold into your overall marketing strategy.

Like anything, you’re better off with a firm that is really good at a couple things than okay at a lot of things. Many Web firms have their own content management systems (CMS), like Webany, so you should specify if you want a proprietary or open source CMS. Mobile is becoming essential for websites, along with SEO and social media, where it can be difficult to determine the true level of experience being sold. Ideally you will find all these disciplines under one roof to reduce the amount of time you’ll spend managing multiple vendors.

Always be sure to ask for references with whom you can speak and examples of past work.

Read tips from Scott Robinson about choosing the right web developer.

Read about tips for keeping up with the digital revolution and getting unstuck.

If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. Good luck!

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Andy Swindler Categories: How To, Marketing, Web

The only two articles you’ll be able to read on Wikipedia today describe the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. The rest are unavailable due to a widespread blackout on the Internet. You might have noticed Google’s logo expressing their support, shown below. Google didn’t go as far as to shut the search engine down, which may very well put the Earth off its axis at this point, but they do have a SOPA/PIPA petition you can sign.

If you’re unfamiliar with this new legislation under review, it’s worth knowing about. The short version is that it has the potential to violate the First Amendment, censor and cripple the Internet, impose harmful regulations on American business and threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions. It is thoroughly documented, so I will point you to TechCrunch’s SOPA coverage for the latest.

Fellow tech entrepreneur Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, has been fighting this battle for months. Go Ben! People took notice when Ben threatened to move his 1,000+ domain names away from GoDaddy if they continued to support the bill. Today, if you try to pull up one of his websites, FAIL Blog, you’ll see the following message before entering the site:

Ben is not alone. While Facebook hasn’t officially joined the ranks, Zuckerberg has. I haven’t been extremely vocal about this for various reasons, but not because I support the bills. I generally feel that ridiculous measures like this written by people who don’t truly understand the consequences will blow over in time. But that doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens thanks to thousands or millions of people who make a stand.

And it’s always a useful reminder of the power lawmakers have, and the attention we must pay to our own power to help them craft policies that positively influence our lives. Someone once told me that technology moves much faster than the law, and this is one of those points of conflict that can emerge.

If you want to help and have about 10 seconds, this SOPA/PIPA petition from Avaaz.org is a good place to start.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Technology, Web

This month we’re writing about things that inspire us. In our digital world there are countless innovations, so I’m often inspired by new approaches to old problems.

I’ve noticed a shift in how local services are supplied to consumers and businesses. Until recently, websites vying for the holy grail of bringing local customers and service providers together used classified- or forum-type websites that allow service providers to post what they do generically. Customers were expected to sift through these listings or post what they needed and hope for the best. This paradigm is being uprooted due to rapid advances in Web and mobile technology that put the customer in charge.

The bottleneck of traditional marketing forced companies to create products and services they believed people need or want. Or in some extreme cases, companies created products they knew people didn’t need, and simply used their marketing prowess to convince people to buy their products anyway.

Small or independent service providers have largely followed suit, mimicking the marketing strategies and tactics that have restricted corporations to a limited number of products and services that can’t possibly cater to every daily need of billions of unique individuals.

Innovative local marketplaces now enable consumers to articulate exactly what they want or need at any given moment, typically via a GPS-enabled smartphone, and then leave it up to the service providers to find them and in some cases even duke it out for their business.

The wild increase in personal efficiency articulated by The New York Times is possible due to technology that enables people to tell companies what they want rather than the other way around. Now people of all walks of life make their own hours by doing exactly what people need when they need it for the amount they want to pay. This growing wave of independent providers avoid the waste and annoyance of casting wide nets with traditional marketing. This was a battle they’d never win against the corporations, so rather than keep trying they changed the rules of the game.

Here are a few that stand out:

Zaarly – Post what you want done and what you’re willing to pay. For instance, our own Tim McDonald who helped launch Zaarly tells the story of an Illinois man who needed help fishing his keys out of a storm sewer and got it done for $75.

TaskRabbit – “Do more. Live more. Be more.” People post what they need done and TaskRabbit-vetted service providers make offers to do the work, allowing the consumer to choose the best fit based on their criteria.

Agent Anything – Connects busy, hardworking people who need things done with college students looking to make money.

Will these resources help consumers focus on what they need rather than want? Not likely. It’s not hard to imagine dreaming up all kinds of random tasks you ask to have done, just to see if you can get them done for a small price. This is refreshing in a world over-crowded with group deals, coupons, and classified sites providing yet another place for service providers to sell their wares and creating confusion for consumers who don’t know where to begin.

This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other epiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Mobile, Technology

You might have heard about Google’s announcement to purchase Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5 billion. On the surface this would seem to be a move to solidify the Android ecosystem and cult by starting to build and distribute their own mobile hardware (cell phones and tablets).

That’s part of it. Apple has demonstrated the market power and profitability that a proper cult following can generate and continues to demonstrate this commitment by practically giving away their newest operating system, Lion ($29), and actually giving away their upcoming iCloud service to all Lion users. Not a bad way to get people to buy the latest and greatest.

Not too far beneath Google’s surface brews a tempest that has significant implications for all mobile technology innovation in the years to come. Google’s main interest in Motorola is 17,000-plus patents that allow them to enter the patent wars currently underway. In this war, patents are conglomerated legal cards to be played as part of an ongoing legal strategy for each company vying for market share.

Patents were designed to fuel innovation by rewarding someone’s original idea, allowing him or her a specific period of time to capitalize monetarily on that idea. Technology moves much faster than the law, and we’re quickly seeing the limitations of copyright, trademark, and patent law as they currently stand.

On the heels of reports saying Android phones occupy nearly half the market, one might wonder how such a deal could get through anti-trust court. To Google’s credit, this does represent a new business sector for them as they wisely licensed the Android OS (classic Microsoft strategy) rather than building hardware (Apple). Now how do you think those dozens of hardware manufactures feel about competing directly with a company owned by their licensor?

While Larry Page states that the deal will “enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences,” I’m not convinced. The little guy doesn’t have the legal muscle to enter the patent wars, and is often only brought in unknowingly after he’s had some success.

Certainly Google has offered much innovation to the world, and some see as a defensive move. I have a limited amount of trust for any large corporation, and these days that includes Google and even Apple. If you’ve been watching this game awhile, it may seem somewhat ironic to see Apple and Microsoft banding together to sue Google. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

This situation makes me squirm the way much of our stock market does. What was created as an institution to allow anyone to invest in a company, hitching his or her star to the success and failure of that company, has become an abstraction that allows people to place bets on the success or failure of anything or nothing. We’ve seen how well that played out in recent years.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Gadget, Technology

An old college friend who avoids social networks addressed an intriguing problem recently:

“I’ve just decided what it is I don’t like about Social Networking… it’s the idea that it, when push comes to shove, my people can bury your people… Please, tell me I’m wrong, that the end result doesn’t allow those with the most connections to dominate society further for their own benefit at the expense of those with the fewest connections. Much like the rich vs. the poor struggles of yesteryear, only now we can rise above money – look, it’s purely about fame and how well you’re liked.”

As an indirect middle finger to bullies of the past who gained advantage by physical body size, bullies in the social networking world are often the geeks! One of the reasons people are racing to Google+ is that it’s easier and more natural to organize friend groups based on the way humans naturally organize themselves rather than feeling like you’re a database admin trying to maximize the efficiency of a friend database.  

Somewhere deep within Facebook are the tools and settings to make sure the people you care about show up before the “bullies.” Also, perceptions are skewed when Facebook’s algorithm tends to give people exposure simply for talking more rather than saying something you’d necessarily care about. Google+ Circles seem to move this in the right direction by making it easier and more intuitive to share certain info with specific groups.

I’m not 100% sold on Google generally, as it often behaves as one of the biggest bullies out there. I think all of this is perhaps the greatest social experiments we’ve ever witnessed, certainly the most public. And like all things, once our fascination with the technology wears off we can just get back to being people. Until then, I agree that human nature seems only to fight against the true potential of this technology: to bring us together and make people more efficient and benevolent. It unfortunately tends to provoke paranoia, greed, and ego as well.

Humans and other primates are intoxicated by celebrity. Social media has elevated many of us to a level of semi-celebrity, but still lends power to those with means and connections above the masses. I’m not sure this will ever change, as I do believe it’s part of our very nature, for better or worse. I share the dream of technology enabling collective good, but feel that we are quite far from fully realizing it.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

While I’m a frequent traveler to Austin, TX, for music events and family, this was my first time at South By Southwest Interactive (#SXSWi). SXSW is divided into Interactive, Film, and Music festivals, each world-renowned for the quality of talent, content, and fun.

SXSWi is the height of Tech geekery, mostly focused around Web and mobile apps related to social media, such as Foursquare or Twitter. This is my crowd, for sure, and our social media guru Rachel Yeomans was even more plugged in than me due to her incessant and productive use of Twitter.

I dusted off my Twitter account just for the occasion. While I was one of the first people on it three years ago, I’ve found it difficult to keep up, which is a common issue for our clients to which I can relate! I’m glad I brought it out, though, as much of SXSW takes place on Twitter. This isn’t a surprise considering that Twitter essentially launched at SXSW years ago, but what did surprise me was the advanced and consistent use of hash tags to create interactive audience feedback for every session. Moderators would monitor the Twitter traffic for that session and involve the audience as they could.

Most of the big tech brands were present, as were most of the geek celebrities. A highlight for me was getting to meet a childhood geek hero, Guy Kawasaki, who was there supporting his new book, Enchantment. I fondly remember reading Guy’s column in MacUser magazine in the early 90s. As Chief Evangelist for the Mac when it was first released in 1984, he was there right at the beginning. Now he turns much of his attention to helping entrepreneurs, writing, speaking, and VC’ing. I got to meet him at his book signing, pictured below!

The learning, networking, funning, eating, and yes… drinking, all made for a dense and highly worthwhile experience, starting with legos. When we first arrived at the conference center, I found three huge tables full of legos, which immediately put me in a five-year-old state of mind. Perfect! No, we didn’t spend the whole time there, but it was a good way to get the juices flowing.

Me and my amazing creation…

And our friend Miguel Cano, from JSH&A, working on his own…

Presenter highlights included Chicago friend Jenni Prokopy (ChronicBabe) talking about building better health communities. An interview with publisher Tim O’Reilly gave us a glimpse into the future of digital. I learned about everything from social media metrics to text donations for nonprofits to web typography to mobile optimization to user experience process and more. I did make it one film event — a panel with Rainn Wilson for his new movie, Super. And somewhere in there we even made it to a couple of parties!

The food trucks are a highlight of Austin, particularly in the downtown area. Rachel, Miguel, and I walked until we found one with a short line — Turf N’ Surf Poboys. Yum…

Major sponsor and Foursquare competitor Gowalla was heavily represented, though I stuck to Foursquare personally. And vowel-challenged startup SCVNGR had everyone running around finding things for various types of rewards. All this served as real world preview of what is being largely hailed as the “next big thing” — the gamification of pretty much everything. What’s that? Well, it basically means that technologies with built-in game mechanics are more successful at getting people to actually use the technology. The best app in the world is useless if nobody uses it.

Foursquare, in my opinion, is the most successful example of merging game motivation with real-world advertising. While I’ve been using the mobile app for nearly two years, I’ve never seen such an intense concentration as I did at SXSW. People were checking in to everything, everywhere. Every room, event, party, and sometimes cars. I hit a new week record of 403 points! They released a big update to the app for SXSW, so it now tells you lots of good tidbits related to your own data, such as how long it’s been since you were at that location. This intrigues me since I purposefully choose not to broadcast my location to very many people.

The Foursquare people were everywhere as well. Forty of them came to SXSW, including co-founder Dennis Crowley, who I saw interviewed by Mashable SEO Pete Cashmore. In a particularly humbling moment for Dennis, an enormous print of his GAP ad was brought on stage and offered up to the audience member with the best question.

Dennis spoke about the future of Foursquare, and his vision to help you remember and find that coffee shop your friends were telling you to visit when you go to San Francisco, for instance. I also had a nice chat with Foursquare General Manager Evan Cohen after a smaller discussion he led with Lisa Bradner of Geomentum about the future of geo-related marketing and advertising.

Saving one of the most amazing moments for last, Rachel suggested we check out a live recording of The Nerdist with Chris Hardwick podcast at Esther’s Follies, a really fun local venue with lots of history. Fifteen minutes into the recording, Chris said it was time to bring out their special guest, who was none other than John Oliver from The Daily Show! Rach and I just about fell out of our chairs, as we’re both HUGE fans. We were treated to more than an hour of John hamming it up with the guys.

We’re looking forward to next year! Hope to see you there, too.

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

We’ve reached the end of a significant phase with eMainstay, a client with whom Astek has spent the last three years building the My25 web-based meal-planning software to improve health and reduce management costs for communities housing people with developmental disabilities.

In order to broaden the market for the software, which has proven highly successful in numerous USDA-funded studies, eMainstay approached Astek to develop a robust new My25 prototype for the software and online community development. We chose video as the form to convey our vision for the future of our software and a truly innovative approach to household-oriented meal planning.

The videos below say it better than words. Bon Appetit!

My25 Business Overview

My25 Online Toolkit Intro

Extra special thanks to Vin Design, Kathleen Ermitage, and Sedgwick Productions for their multiple contributions to the ongoing success of this project.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Marketing, Technology, Web

This month we’re discussing Web analytics and how they can help you construct your website in the manner that will best enable you to reach your goal, whether it’s to generate leads, sell products, express thought leadership, or anything else. There are numerous design and strategic decisions involved in each of these. To help you get started, I’ve provided a simple outline of things to consider.

1. Establish your goals. You must know what you want to get from your website before you talk about how to design or build it.

2. Have a clear call to action. If you want people to buy something, don’t be afraid to make the “Buy Now” button prominent. If you want people to contact you for more information, put your phone number on the top of every page.

3. Study your analytics to figure out what kind of people are visiting your site. You’ll know from where they came, for what they searched to find you, and all kinds of other goodies.

4. Start with a wireframe storyboard to establish the strategy and hierarchy of your site before getting into the design and graphics of it. Using your goals established above, create a rough sketch of the most important elements on the page starting at the top. People still read left to right, top to bottom, so they will see everything “above the fold” before clicking or scrolling. And if they don’t see what they are looking for, they might not look any farther.

5. Design to build trust. Use trust icons such as affiliations, awards, memberships, ratings, partners, and certifications to create immediate recognition of brand value for the visitor.

6. Focus on benefits not features. Every successful company does many things well, and we often focus on listing our features. However, focusing on the actual benefits or value you bring to the table creates a much more compelling point of differentiation. (Thanks, Mr. Schmooze, for that one)

Using this process should help you establish your goals at any stage in the Web design process. The more information you have going into it, the better you’ll be able to communicate your goals with your Web consulting partner.

Here is an example of a landing page we designed for a client’s pay-per-click ad campaign in the data center business to give you some ideas:

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Technology, Web

Mobile marketing has changed a lot in the past couple of years. Geo-targeting uses your smart phone’s GPS to find out where you are, allows you to “check in” to a location, and deliver targeted messages to you based on that information.

Leaders in the geo-targeting space include Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt (plus LooptStar). They are similar in many ways, but each offers a different twist on an increasingly familiar theme. They enable local businesses to find and attract consumers in new ways, such as offering coupons or special offers to regulars based on how many times they’ve come in. Like many start-ups, none have mastered the monetization aspect of mobile marketing, but there are clearly endless opportunities here.

In order to give people incentive to use the apps, various forms of social “rewards” are used that essentially turn exploring your city into a game. We are social creatures, and while some of these rewards may seem meaningless or frivolous, there is an attraction to them as they create an element of social status within communities. A large part of the appeal to people in large cities with lots of friends is to make sure you never miss the action, but I believe the jury is still out as to the real social value of this once the initial allure wears off a bit.

While this isn’t intended to be an in-depth review, I’ll discuss some interesting distinctions of each:

Foursquare – I’ve been on Foursquare for about a year now. It’s been amazing to watch the database of local places grow since it depended on the community to enter locations. Now it’s rare that I go somewhere that isn’t already there. The person who frequents a location the most becomes the “mayor” and some establishments give benefits for that position. You collect virtual badges for achieving certain things, like being in a place with at least 50 other people (Swarm) or hitting 4 clubs in one night (Crunked). You get the idea. Foursquare made a gamble by creating a new database of locations and friends, but it seems to have paid off. The most compelling thing about this is the special offers that are based on your location. When you check in somewhere, the app will tell you if there is a nearby special, or one at the place you are (a free drink for 10 check-ins for example). While Foursquare has exploded in the past year, I haven’t seen a congruent explosion of the specials offered by businesses.

LooptStar is a spinoff of Loopt, which was historically a more informational type of app. Their new entry enters the “rewards” space more heavily. The thing that LooptStar does that I believe will give it an advantage is use Facebook Connect to leverage the largest existing social network rather than wait for everyone to find their friends on yet another new one. They were later to the game, but I believe this will give them an edge in the long run. In LooptStar you become a “boss” rather than a “mayor.” But the rewards look to be more tangible than FourSquare.

Gowalla benefits from being on all major mobile smart platforms, including Blackberry and Palm. They also rely on partnerships with existing travel-related services to offer “trips” and share those with your friends. While Foursquare provides community tips based on your location, Gowalla focuses more on directly exploring your friends’ favorite locations to learn more about what they like rather than the community at large.

All of these apps feature basic sharing with your Twitter and Facebook feeds to let people know what you’re up to. Yelp has entered the space by adding check-in to its feature set and you can bet that Google is going to be all over this with its massive business database and Android mobile platform. The problem these sites have is that they have established brand and culture that make it harder to break into new areas.

While this space is fascinating to watch, it still has a long way to go. The apps depend largely upon smart phones such as iPhone and Android, which represent the minority of the mobile market. Also, I feel that any app that requires you to actively check in to a location rather than simply knowing where you are is going to appeal more to geeks and early adopters than the majority of people. It can be very distracting to interrupt your social experience. “Wait guys… I have to check in here first…”

What’s the alternative? Remember Minority Report, when Tom Cruise’s retinas were scanned everywhere he went? In that version of the future, you didn’t even need a device to tell the network where you were. Cameras were so ubiquitous that they knew anyway. Scary? A bit. Possible? You bet.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology

My great and talented friend, Aarti Sequeira, proves that social media can help make your dreams come true. She turned her homemade YouTube-based cooking-variety show, Aarti Paarti, into a spot on The Next Food Network Star, premiering this Sunday, June 6, at 9p/8c on the Food Network.

Aarti’s show features original how-to recipes with distinct India influences that just about anyone can make. I was fortunate to interview Aarti and learned a few things I didn’t know about her fantastic journey from laptop to living room. Enjoy!

What first inspired you to create Aarti Paarti in early 2009?

I was floundering at the time — my career in journalism had evaporated, and I hadn’t had that fire in my belly to chase it. I had just finished co-producing Sand and Sorrow, one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life; I’d had the chance to work on a story that really impacts our humanity, for a Peabody Award-winning director, narrated by George Clooney and eventually bought by HBO. How can you top that?! I tried to find more documentary work, but that was right as the economy was shrinking, so there wasn’t money or interest in doing “another Africa documentary.” Isn’t that sad?

Anyway, at that time, cooking had grown into a real passion in my life. I had completed a part-time cooking program, interned at a James Beard Award-winning restaurant (Lucques, helmed by Suzanne Goin) and realised that restaurant life was not for me. I was totally stumped about what I supposed to do with my life, and it was depressing me. Here I was, a Northwestern graduate, a former CNN employee, a documentary filmmaker… with no drive to do anything but make dinner. Finally, one day, my friend said, “You need to do a cooking show, a cool one, where there’s someone in the kitchen with you and you’re chatting through the whole cooking process.”

My husband, Brendan, ran with the idea, and within a day, had written a complete one-sheet with a solid concept for a show called “aarti paarti”, where I would be cooking for a bunch of my friends, who we’d cut away to as the food simmered or roasted — since all my friends are actors/performers, they’d be doing something amazing. We shot it one day, and we got 13 hours of footage. It was unrealistic to try to put that together into a pilot by ourselves, so months later, I got so frustrated that I just picked up the camera and shot a quick 10-minute episode myself. My husband shot the next episode and we started incorporating the variety show angle, which I just love. And the rest is history! We’ve shot over 30 episodes so far, featuring everything from a uke-strumming juggling clown to singing puppets to a belly dancer!

(I made a cameo [4:20] in this episode, which for some strange reason has more views than any other…)

What equipment/knowledge/materials does someone need to produce a show like this?

We borrow the camera, a Panasonic dvx100, an older model that still shoots beautifully, but not in HD. It’s our dream to upgrade to an HD camera — can you imagine how good the food will look in HD?! Those cameras don’t cost more than a few hundred dollars these days, but you need a good cameraman to shoot, which normally is pretty expensive. Luckily, I’m married to one! Tape is pretty cheap, $100 for a box of 64-minute tapes. We also borrow mics whenever we can, because good sound psychologically makes your visuals look better.

I edit the show on my Macbook Pro, using Final Cut Pro, which is pretty expensive but wonderful. I taught myself how to use Final Cut by using the classes at lynda.com, which is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20 a month. Food costs are pretty low, about $50 per episode, and we get to eat it afterwards!

What advice would you pass on to someone starting their own YouTube show?

Make your show look good — get someone who can really shoot, who’s got a steady hand, who can shoot from different angles. I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve seen where the cooking show host is just facing the camera head on for the entire video. So boring! And stuffy! Make your show as fluid as possible.

Also, make sure you get close-ups of all the food and action, and capture any natural sound too — they make for nice breaks in the action, just like a little breath. And speak normally, in regular English… don’t try to be anything you aren’t. The more you try to fancy yourself up, the stiffer you’re going to come across.

How long was the show posted before it started to get attention?

At first, my videos got about 100 views, and that stayed pretty steady until I started doing videos for Goodbite.com a couple of months into it. Then the numbers rose to somewhere in the 300-400 region. I realised that when naming my videos, I had to include words/phrases that people would be searching for. For example, my samosa episode got about 1000 views, probably because people were searching for a good samosa recipe. Now that the Food Network Show is about to start, I assume I’ll get somewhere in the region of 10,000 views, fingers crossed!

(Great SEO instincts, Aarti! Learn more about SEO)

Is it difficult to keep up with the schedule and come up with new ideas? What keeps you motivated?

It *is* hard to stay motivated. Toward the end of each season, I inevitably feel like I don’t have any energy or ideas left. But having your husband as your producer is good (and bad!!) for that, because he pushes me when I don’t feel like I have anything left to give. Every season, we try to have the recipes and the variety acts planned out before we start shooting, so I’m not scrambling at the last minute. But, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the ideas for recipes come effortlessly. Sometimes it’s much harder. Usually that’s when I’m overthinking it. And Bren is great at coming up with the variety acts.

What other social media tools/sites/channels do you use to promote the show? Are these critical to its success?

I update my Twitter and Facebook accounts when a new video is up. I also created a fan page for Aarti Paarti on Facebook, and I put the video up on that page first. And, I send out an email to over 500 people with a link to the video. Oh! And of course! I write out the recipe with a back story on my blog, aartipaarti.com.

Why did you go with YouTube over other video sites?

I wanted to put them up on ONE venue so that I wasn’t splitting viewers between sites. I much prefer the video quality and layout of Vimeo, and the cool community of artists gathered there, but I found that some people’s computers couldn’t play their high-quality videos. I also wanted to garner the most eyeballs possible, and since YouTube is still the biggest outlet for videos, I figured that when people want to see online cooking videos, they’d go to YouTube before they went to Vimeo.

How much professional cooking experience/training have you had, and is that more or less important than just getting right to the experiments?

I trained at the New School of Cooking — I find that essential in understanding the science behind cooking, so that when I want to make food with particular flavours and textures, I know how to get there. It shortens the experimentation process. My journalism training definitely helps me write on my blog and stay comfortable on camera.

How important is collaboration for your show?

I couldn’t do my show without collaboration. Full stop. My husband is just as vital to the show as I am. And I couldn’t do it without all the artists who perform on my show!

Did Aarti Paarti help you get selected by The Food Network?

Aarti Paarti gave me weekly practice at my dream job for about a year! Every week, I got a little more comfortable talking to camera, whilst preparing food, which is a little bit like rubbing your tummy whilst tapping your head. That meant, by the time I sent in my application video to the Food Network, I had gotten pretty good at letting my personality and my food style shine through. Being on camera is much harder than you think!

Check out Aarti on The Next Food Network Star premiere this Sunday on The Food Network at 9p/8c, Sunday, June 6.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Web