The Great Lakes Floral Expo in Michigan was last weekend. The kickoff evening featured a flower-themed, tango-inspired dance performance. The program included some fantastic florist-specific workshops on everything from designing with latest tools to tips for photographing your work.

The highlight was the Iron Chef-style floral design competition. Florists did not know what flowers, tools, or accents they would have to work with. They had a limited time to make their creations, while being watched by an audience.

Here are some action shots and then pictures of the final (and winning) designs.

We hope you liked the highlights – stay tuned for more from next week’s Northeast Floral Expo!

Brought to you by Floranext – we make great florist websites and floral Point of Sale!

Valentine’s Day is around the corner. It’s a good time to get your florist website looking it’s best for the season.

Take a look at some of these great new Valentine’s Day backgrounds and banners for your florist websites. Floranext website and floral Point of Sale customers can easily change their designs for seasons and holidays.

Does your website allow you to change backgrounds and banners? Feel free to grab these backgrounds for your own website!

Interested in upgrading your florist technology? Take a look at Floranext’s florist websites and floral POS – we’re florists ourselves and we’re here to help, so feel free to get in touch with us!

Wishing your flower shop a happy, profitable Valentine’s Day!

Google Ads are one of the keys to building your florist website business. No one should be running an online flower shop without a Google Adwords campaign. But how to get started?

First what are Google Adwords. Simply put, Google lets you bid on search terms like “florist” or “florist in San Francisco.” You can choose to put a text ad alongside these terms. Google lets advertisers bid on ads, and puts the most-clicked and best content sites at the top.

Here are some pointers for how to build a successful advertising campaign. Make sure to approach this as a trial and error exercise at the beginning. It will take some time to get the formula just right!

1. Location Specific Keywords – Choose your domain names carefully. Don’t waste your time on the keyword “florist”. You’re competing against the big guys who can outspend you. Instead, go for “Akron Florist” or “Akron best florist”. Make sure to use whatever keywords you choose in your ad!

2. Track your conversions using Google Analytics – know if your advertising is generating profits for you. Google Analytics enables you to see which of your orders came directly from a Google ad.

3. Deep Linking – Link some of your ads to specific sub pages rather than your front page. For example, link a ad for funeral flowers to your funeral page, link your weddings ad to a wedding page, etc.

4. Domain Names – Google will give your ad a quality score based on the content on your page and the domain name. Your ad will do better if your keywords are in your domain name. For exmaple, if your keywords are “Akron florist” and your website is www.johnsflorist.com, it will do less well (and you will get fewer clicks) than if your website is www.akronflorist.com.

Have a bad domain name? Don’t worry! You can buy additional domains and set up domain forwarding to your primary website. Examples of good keywords/domain name pairs are: Akron funeral florist/akronfuneralflorist.com, Akron best florist/akronbestflorist.com, Akron gift baskets/akrongiftbaskets.com, Akron cheap florist/akroncheapflorist.com, Akron best flower shop/akronbestflowershop.com — these domain names will only help your organic search a bit, but they will give a boost to your google adwords conversion.

Ultimately, Google strategy will only get you so far – customers are shopping around online and are very choosey. Average flower purchases online are under $40. So if your front page is filled with $100 arrangements, you may turn off the majority of customers that are looking for value. Make sure your front page has $30, $35, $40 arrangements right on the front page.

In sum, adwords are the key to making money online. Don’t think of it as a nice to have — adwords are an essential part of making money through your florist website. The great thing is that Google makes it easy for a small florist to compete with big companies with big budgets.

Limited time offer – sign up for Floranext website or POS and get $75 in free Google Adwords. Contact us for a free demo! 

Want $75 in free Google Adwords. Get it when you sign up for one of florist website or point of sale packages

Christmas season is upon us – time to spruce up your florist website. That means adding a seasonal holiday backgrounds to make sure your customers feel the holiday spirit!

Take a look at some of the great new backgrounds for Floranext florist websites. Floranext website and floral Point of Sale customers can easily change their backrounds for seasons and holidays.

Does your website allow you to change backgrounds? Feel free to grab these backgrounds for your own website!

Want a beautiful website where you can show off your products and desings? Want to save money on your wire service website and start making more? Get in touch with us today for a free florist website demo!

The Society of American Florists has a new batch of banners for your floral website. Summer, spring, winter, fall – and everything in between. Kudos to SAF for making floral software even easier for the busy florist!

If you’re a Floranext florist website customer, you can easily upload these banners to your website and link them to seasonal and holiday categories like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

Best of all, the banners are free! Here is sampling of some of the great new banner designs from SAF! (Click on the images to see a bigger version!)

Do you want to download these and other amazing banners for your website? Click here to head over to SAF and check out even more banners!

Want a great floral website where you can add your own banners and create your own unique online brand? Get in touch with Floranext for a free trial!

Creating a free video for your wedding web page has never been easier. There are lots of great tools for making video slideshows of your wedding flowers – just upload photographs and get a video instantly! Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create a great video for your florist website or to share on your flower shop’s Facebook page. And if you need any help, contact Floranext and we can help!

But first! Here are a few examples of wedding videos – we created these in less than 10 minutes. We turned these photographs into these videos:

Try Floranext’s florist POS and florist website free until 2012! Yes, you heard that right, free!

Floranext today announced the launch of its combined florist POS and website solution – in order to celebrate we’re offering Floranext’s basic package for free until 2012! All you need to do is CLICK HERE to create a florist website before Friday, October 7th.

Why free? We have been retail florists for 40 years – we built Floranext for our own shop. We want to share the tools that have worked so well for our own business with other florists.

Why Use Floranext’s Florist Websites?
– Unique, beautiful website designs
– Independent solution
– Increase the number of orders
– Save money versus wire services
– Free until 2012! (When you sign up before October 20th!)

Why Use Floranext’s Florist Point of Sale?
– Faster phone and walk-in orders
– Keep track of customers for marketing
– Set up in 1 day flat, no hardware required

How do you get your free florist website until 2012? You can create a florist website in minutes – just CLICK HERE to use the Floranext website builder and set up your free florist website.

https://floranext.com and click Try Now!

Teleflora Chairman Tom Butler

FFC gave the wire services a chance to engage with the audience, respond, and answer questions.

Bloomnet Presentation – Gino Marotta, Director of National Sales

– Their model – Shops that use more pay more, shops that use less, pay less. “Support legislation deceptive advertising. Have not had a fee increase in 3 years. ”

– Declined affiliate membership – because of ambiguity of membership. Legal council says when you’re public, you can’t make an agreement without Board approval

– How to support national ad campaign – not a clear answer. Could create fee for members, but don’t like that idea. Or could partner by offering discounts to member of FFC and put that towards FFC.

Teleflora Presentation – Tom Butler, Chairman and others

– Teleflora is a technology company: 5,000 POS users, 7,500 Credit Card users, 11,000 web users, 15,000 Dove

– TF believes it is pro-local – $3 million spend on Superbowl ad anti-boxed flowers.

– Reducing the split to 90/10 — it’s a challenge because then other companies who don’t agree will pick up the extra orders from order gatherers. It will be bad for Teleflora members because it will reduce the number of incoming orders.

Attendees interested in specific committees met to start talking and making decisions. Some were straightforward, others were less so. Floranext participated in the Technology committee discussion, but here is a summary of all of them.

Legislative committee – discussed wire service fees and rebates.

– Fee Split: Agreement on the need to achieve a 90/10 split between sender and receiving florist in order to dis-incentivize order gatherers. Feeling that rebates won’t go away, but need to be fairer. Controversial discussions were on whether to include grocery store florists as in FFC.

Organization Committee – FFC has created a legal entity

– Legal Entity: a 501c6 — a league of business owners. This limits what FFC can do – for example, any F2F network cannot be part of this organization.

– Representation: Any committee would need to represent different size of shops, since they may have different interests. This would be assessed by the number of employees, with four categories of shop size.

– Election and Terms: Two-year terms, elections in January via Internet, to allow for maximum participation. One member one vote was discussed – should multi-shop operations get more than one vote? Probably not.

– Role of Committees: Committees make recommendations, board makes decisions.

Membership Committee – Cost and privileges of membership

– Fees: $120/year for florists, $500/year for Associate Members + some clearly defined revenue stream. Right now membership fee will be low because benefits and discounts are still in process

– Spreading the Word – Goal for everyone present to talk to 10 florists, and get them to talk to 5 more. That will give us 25% of the floral industry or more, and that is a real movement.

Technology Committee – FFC is there to support independent technology vendors, rather than to build technologies itself.

– F2F Network: Discussion of the need for scale, clearing house competency, PCI compliance that make creating a F2F network a major undertaking. For now FFC is supportive of independent providers of F2F network.

– Florist directory: Discussion about creating a directory of florists. Would require a new brand, separate from FFC

– Access to Wire Service Orders: Currently in order to get wire service orders on a POS, you need to buy wire service hardware/software. Can we force wire services to inter-operate with other companies technology, so you can be a member of a wire service without buying their technology?

– Comparison Chart: FFC should create a comparison chart of technology options for member florists.