Skybox Ink recently printed high gloss promotion fliers for the upcoming 2nd Annual San Diego Spirits Festival in beautiful downtown San Diego. The event runs from June 2-5, with the main event and “Grand Tasting” on Saturday at the Hilton Bayfront’s 4.3 acre waterfront park.

The finale features TASTINGS OF OVER 65 BRANDS OF SPIRITS, BARTENDER CHALLENGE, PAYNE MASON CIGARS, SILENT AUCTION, and a menagerie of entertainment including a live band and burlesque dancers with many more surprises for everyone to enjoy.

The premier event: The Dual Bartender/Chef challenge is on June 3 from 5-8pm at the US Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego.

Individual Tickets can be purchased for the Challenge for $25 
and included in the Festival VIP package for $100 
Saturday Only General Public Tickets $50 – Last year they SOLD OUT, so pick up your tickets today!

She gave us the green light to go out and find our phenomenal. Don’t cover it up, or dim the light that shines from within because fear, you have no seat at this table. Lisa Nichols has a powerful way with words.

The Secret’s Nichols, also author of the best seller, No Matter What, spoke to a Point Loma Marriott ballroom full of female (and some male) entrepreneurs at the National Association of Women Business Owner’s annual BRAVO! Awards Dinner Wednesday night.

Skybox Creative and Skybox Ink President Angelina Sereno was honored during the evening as a nominee for NAWBO’s Green Community Award, which was won by the Artisan Design Group, a green interior design and architectural firm. Skybox Creative staff had the pleasure of meeting Jenny Lemmons of A Better Way to Say It, an online marketing firm, and Elizabeth Smiley, a CPA with Squar Milner during the evening festivities.

The event, which included a silent auction, cocktail hour and three course dinner, was highlighted by speaker Lisa Nichols’ inspiring sentiments regarding unlocking the entrepreneurial spirit. Watch the video to hear some of her powerful messages!

Great Web Design is just the beginning! Being found on the search engines, particularly the leader, Google, is critical to growing and sustaining your business – that’s why SEO and social media are such prevalent topics these days. Understanding SEO can be complicated, but luckily there are tools that make it easier!

One such tool is SEO Doctor for Firefox. This tool will help you understand and diagnose SEO problems on your site as well as understand factors of success on competitor websites.

At glance

SEO Doctor is made with both beginners and experienced SEOs in mind and it’s scoring system and recommendations are based on official SEO documents, namely Google Webmaster guidelines, Google Image guidelines and Google SEO starter guide as well as my own experience from years in the profession.

Main features are:

• Points out to potential problems and assigns a score for your pages based on common SEO methodology
• Shows link structure and helps track page rank flow for your pages
• Detects and warns you about pages not indexable by search engines using comprehensive methods
• Quick one-click access to most popular SEO tools allows you to additionally inspect a site
• Fully customizable

Features

By default SEO Doctor will place itself in the browser status bar, immediately providing you with the following information (see image).

SEO Score represents the result of on-site optimization analysis of the currently viewed page. Maximum score is 100 and the green flag will indicate everything is OK. Yellow flag indicates warnings and red flag suggests that concrete SEO elements can be improved. In a special case when the current page is not indexable at all by search engines, the icon will show a special ‘no-trespassing’ icon.

Flow shows how much of the Page Rank has been preserved on the site. 100% means that you preserve 100% of all the Page Rank on your site, while 0% would mean that all outgoing links are to other sites.

Links shows number of external links/total links on the page.

Visits show estimated number of daily visitors for the site (data is retrieved from Compete.com and is available to you if you register for a free API key).

Clicking the nofollow icon allows you to instantly highlight all nofollow links on the page on and off.

Click here to read more and DOWNLOAD.

Source: www.prelovac.com

Skybox Creative (Branding + Web Design) and Skybox Ink (Green Printing) are moving! Due to our growing success and need for more wiggle room, we are moving to a larger suite. We love the central location of our office, so we’re staying in the same building, just moving a few doors down. Please take note that our suite number is changing from 111 to 127 starting next Monday – May 24th, 2010. Our new office has a nice welcome area for clients to lounge and for small meetings.

We’d love to have you come visit us at our new location, so give us a call or email if you would like to stop by info@skyboxcreative.com or 619.381.3825

Clients and business associates, please take note of the change:

Skybox Creative
1081 Camino Del Rio South, Suite 127
San Diego, CA 92108

To a prosperous and successful 2010!!

A group of passionate political entrepreneurs honing their advocacy, campaign work and leadership skills for the betterment of future government and society joined together Friday night to celebrate environmentalism at its finest.

Skybox Creative and Skybox Ink mingled with these “new leaders” at the New Leaders Council, San Diego Chapter’s Fellows Fundraiser on May 14 at San Diego’s chic W Hotel. The event was focused around the future of progressive leadership, which included the group’s presentation of an environmental leadership award to CleanTECH San Diego. CleanTECH is a new non-profit membership organization formed to accelerate San Diego as a world leader in the clean technology economy. They have been able to secure millions of dollars for green projects throughout San Diego County, included the University of California San Diego and San Diego Unified School District. Skybox Ink served as a sponsor of the event.

Building lasting relationships. Meeting people first, seeing them as potential clients second. Creating a sense of community in a land of transplants.

These were all some of the lasting sentiments echoed by David Epstein, one of the founding members of the San Diego Coastal Group. Started on the Linkedin platform, this group has over 1400 members, and is vying to be one of the more connected and bonded groups found in the social media marketplace.

We all have someone on our Facebook page with 1000, 2000 or even 5000 “friends,” but what is their connection to all of these people and will it be affecting their lives in some sort of positive manor?

The San Diego Coastal Group hopes to be able to use social media as a tool to connect, but wants to host monthly, if not bi-weekly gatherings in which people can truly come together, discuss business, friendships, family and more.

Skybox Creative had the pleasure to attend the inaugural meet up at Rancho Santa Fe’s Morgan Run Club and Resort, and were introduced to a group of really innovative and inspiring people, from successful entrepreneurs to those facing career transitions.

Skybox had the opportunity to share our expertise in web development, branding, graphic design, printing and more with guests including, Yasmin Shah, Timothy Rhodes of Tech Coast Sales and scientists Atsuo Kuki and Steven Sands.

On another cool note, Skybox Creative Account Manager Carly Bartkiewicz won a fishing trip raffled off by Epstein during the sit down portion of the evening. Bluefin, yellowtail and the salty ocean air, here we come!

If you’re looking for a networking group that is more than just networking and equally about helping people and connecting with others looking to make a positive difference, definitely join the group and come out to the next event!

Spread the Word About PayPal and Earn Extra Cash!

As a PayPal user, you can collect up to $1,000.00 USD for each new merchant you refer. The Merchant Referral Bonus program rewards you for bringing new businesses to PayPal.

Here’s how it works:

• Log in to your PayPal account
• Get your personalized referral link to send out in emails, add as a banner to your website, or incorporate into your e-commerce application.
• Each time a new merchant signs up for a PayPal Business or Premier account via your link or banner, you’ll immediately start receiving 0.5% of their payment volume – up to $1,000.00 USD.

Here is an example of the PayPal banner you can incorporate on your website:

For more info, click here. If you don’t already have a PayPal account, make sure to click on our banner and sign up, then get your own link and share with your friends and business associates!

Amazon.com Amazon Associates provides an opportunity for people to make money by referring qualifying traffic to the Amazon.com website. Associates drive internet traffic to Amazon.com through specially formatted links that allow them to track sales and other activity. Monthly payments are made to Associates. Once you join the program, they will give you access to Associates Central, an extranet exclusive to our Associates. This is the place where you will build your links, view your traffic and earnings reports, and read about the latest news and opportunities available to you through the program.

Current participants in the Amazon Associates program include large, well-known sites, niche content sites and blogs, comparison shopping engines, search engine marketers, and everything in between.

An Amazon Associate can earn anywhere for 4% to 8.5% depending on sales volume. They have even teamed up with endless.com (a shoe, handbag and accessory retailer) to offer up to a 15% commission on qualifying traffic leads.

It only takes about 5 minutes to set up an account and your ready to integrate one of the easy-to-install options on your website. You can build Affiliate links to Amazon through a variety of banners, widgets or even your very own aStore. The aStore eCommerce option offers the opportunity to create a dedicated shopping area (with shopping cart) on your website in minutes.

Below is an example of the Carousel Widget you can easily integrate into your site.

For a list of all available Amazon.com widgets, click here. But before you go, be sure to purchase one of our recommended items above

Skybox Creative, an award-winning branding and web design firm, attended the San Diego SEO Meetup Group in Clairemont Mesa last night, and we wanted to share some of the quick and easy WordPress SEO tips we learned. (One of the most important themes of the evening being that WordPress is an EXCELLENT tool for SEO, so if you aren’t familiar with the open source blogging software/content management system, we suggest you get on the bandwagon!)

1. Use a question in your blog post titles. Why, you ask? Because when people are searching for information, they are often asking a question in their search.

2. There are thousands upon thousands of plug-ins for WordPress out there, but beware. Older plug-ins often don’t work with the most recent versions of WordPress (which is on 2.9, but getting close to launching 3.0). There are some great SEO plug-ins however, such as the SEO All-in-One and Ping Optimizer (Check out: WordPress Plugin Directory)

3. Utilize Blog Directories and Social Bookmarking Sites. They can be really great ways to drive traffic to your site, and the more niche the directory, the better!

Check out:

StumbleUpon
Mister Wong
Delicious

4. Don’t be a victim. Read up on WordPress Defender so that you can figure out the best methods to secure your blog from hackers. Always make sure you’re using the most recent version of WP and downloading all security updates are good starting points.

5. Blog at least once a week. An inactive blog doesn’t help anyone – especially you or your business. Blogs are meant to have fresh and changing content on a regular basis.

SIDE NOTE: Did you know that the word “Twit” comes from the English? (You Monty Python fans out there no what I am talking about).  Actual meaning is a drunken, upper-class Brit – happy tweeting!

New Leaders Council is an organization who’s mission is to train and support the next generation of progressive political entrepreneurs – those who are leading industries, setting trends, and building institutions that support robust civic and political life in a global America.

NLC is hosting a Cocktail Reception with Congresswoman Susan Davis (Invited) to Present NLC’s Community Collaboration Award honoring CleanTECH San Diego, a clean energy nonprofit in San Diego.

Why honor CleanTECH?
CleanTECH San Diego exemplified NLC’s values of collaborative, progressive leadership by establishing a community coalition to secure $154M in federal allocations for financing renewable energy projects, such as solar power installations, on behalf of a number of local municipalities.

Skybox Ink, an eco-freindly printer, located in San Diego is a supporter of the event. Carly and Angelina will be in attendance and would love to see you there. The event will be held at the W Hotel in downtown San Diego.

Friday, May 14, 2010
6:00-8:00 p.m.

The W Hotel
421 West B Street
Downtown San Diego

Tickets: $20 (Space is limited)
HOSTED APPETIZERS & DRINK SPECIALS INCLUDED

For more information or to register for the event, click here