Anne Heap’s Cake Toppers Techniques Class

Back in January we had an opportunity to fly down to Denver and have Anne participate in a taping for her new online cake decorating class with Craftsy.com. Craftsy has taken the cake decorating world by storm ( at least in the online space) by putting together an wide array of talented cake instructors from around the world.

Craftsy offers a pretty slick online video learning platform and does a brilliant job marketing themselves. They are by far one of the best company’s I’ve seen in this space - they taken advantage of nearly every marketing channel in the online space and really maximize its potential. From email marketing, to google adwords, youtube, and facebook, they have quickly built up a strong fanbase. You can read more about the company in this WSJ profile.

Anne partnered with Craftsy to create a great online learning course on how to make gumpaste cake toppers. I won’t rehash the class here, but I encourage you to check out this page which talks more about the class in greater detail. The class is doing great with over 3000 students already enrolled and the reviews have been really positive. Anne is also available to answer questions and has already answered over 100 questions from students.

Pink Cake Box is holding another contest. This year, we are asking you to vote for your favorite cake for 2010. Your vote will automatically enter you for a chance to win a $100 gift certificate.

And, for every twenty votes we receive, we’ll donate $1 to Icing Smiles, a non-profit organization that provides custom celebration cakes and other treats to families impacted by critical illness of a child.

Our goal is 10,000 votes and a $500 donation to Icing Smiles!

I’m very excited about an interview I did with interview with Jan Zimmerman (author of Web Marketing for Dummies) for her new upcoming book Social Marketing for Dummies.

In the book, Jan will spotlight some of the things Pink Cake Box has done as it relates to Social Media. I put a lot of effort ensuring I provided some insightful and actionable advice for small business owners - I hope everyone enjoys it!

Thanks to small businss guru Matt McGee, I was lucky enough to be interviewed for the most recent issue of Inc. Magazine for a article titled “How to use Multimedia for Business Marketing”

They asked how we used Flickr to help build our company’s brand identity by posting photos of our cakes & cupcakes. We started using Flickr back in late 2005 and found it a great success in helping generate conversation and interest in Pink Cake Box. However, more recently we’ve focused more on You Tube and Facebook. We’ve found these channels generate more traffic and conversions. And as a general rule, we like to keep our social media strategy limited to a select few sites to help make best use of our time.

A few weeks ago I introduced a new page on Pink Cake Box that allows fans to see the most popular cakes of the day.

The cakes are chosen based on the number of views for that day combined with the age of the cake. In other words, newer cakes are given a bit more weight to account for the fact they don’t have as many external links:

It’s interesting to see which cakes are consistently popular. This 13 year old topsy turvy cake is consistently in the top ten. Similarly this sweet 16 cake is also usually in the top ten.

As a next step, I think it would be interesting to create a rating system to allow people to rate cakes. That could then be another factor used to determine the most popular cakes of the day.

Pink Cake Box is offering chance at a free cake up to $500. All proceeds raised from the raffle will benefit the American Cancer Society. For brides, this is your chance to get the cake of your dreams from one of the top cake decorators in the United States (at least that’s my somewhat biased opinion but checkout their cake gallery to decide for yourself).

You can purchase your Raffle Ticket here.

If you do not want to enter the raffle, but still want to help you can visit our Pink Cake Box team page to make a donation.

Thanks,

Jesse

I’m excited about the latest project I just finished up for Pink Cake Box. The idea for the project came from Matt McGee’s Small Business Search Engine Marketing blog. (Sidenote: Matt’s blog has some of the most actionable advice for small businesses - check his small business marketing section for great SMB advice.)

The idea is to use Google Maps as a vehicle for displaying one’s product. On Matt’s blog he originally profiled a lawn care company in PA who implemented the idea for their lawn care customers. Matt followed that post up with another implementation by a florist in Anaheim CA.

I figured this would be a great idea for our cake company. It could help visually depict our delivery radius and also help us showcase some of our cakes/cupcakes. I explored following the traditional user-created content approach for google maps (called Google My Maps) but that meant manually maintaining data that is already available on our website.

So I took another route - I created a wordpress plugin that automatically pulls data from our existing blog posts. I setup two custom fields for every post - “Lat/Lng” and “Venue”.

If the “Lat/Lng” field is populated, the plugin will automatically extract additional information from the post and display it on the map based on the latitude and longtitude coordinates:

We even placed a marking in Denver, CO for a cake we created while taping for the Food Network Cake Challenge. And I expect to create another marker in California for another televised cake challenge as soon as we are contractually allowed to talk about it ;) Also, I added functionality to link directly to items on the map using the post id. So for example, this link will take you directly to the Food Network cake in Denver.

The one downside of this approach is we don’t get the SEO benefits of using Google My Maps. Google My Maps can show up in Google Map search results. But the advantage of having this tightly integrated with our blog is a great timesaver and outweighs the cons of not having the map show up in google map search results.

Today we released a new Twitter application on Pink Cake Box’s wedding blog.

The application is called SweetTweet and lets you send birthday cakes and cupcakes via Twitter.

With a lot help from a fantastic photo slider tutorial from Jesse Janzer, we created a slick photo viewer to allow users to easily select a cake to send via Twitter. Jesse put together a great tutorial and his wife is a fantastic wedding photographer in Utah.

We also need to thank Aravind Ajith from the Design Superhero for his free twitter bird icons. My design skills are poor at best and his twitter bird icon helped add some level of graphical sophistication to the application.

You can try SweetTweet for yourself here.

Thanks to a referral from Matt Mcgee, Anne had the opportunity to share some experiences about the power of social media and the web for helping grow your business.

Her article appeared in the magazine Small Business Asset magazine which is targeted at small businesses. Hopefully her story will help inspire other small businesses to help jumpstart their Internet strategy.

Where’s Arnold Diaz from Shame on You when you need him?

We have a fairly liberal photo use policy at Pink Cake Box. We allow most non-commercial sites to use our photos as long as they add a link back to our site. The majority of people respect this license and for the most part we haven’t had any major issues.

But invariably some people violate this policy, and one of our blog readers recently notified of a really shameful violation:

Hey Anne, I write to your because of course, I love your cakes! And 2, because a couple weeks ago I was at a red light, and I saw a small truck from a cake company here in Santiago, Chile, with one of your cakes pictures printed on the back! I don’t know if you have the rights or if they have a permission from you (iI don’t think they’d do), so I thought I should let you know someone is using your cake in their company image. I took some pics of it with my cell hone, they’re not good, but here they are :

The company’s name is Candelle and their website is www.candelle.cl Note: Other cake designers will notice they have also used stolen photos in their gallery.

Update: There is one more egregious offender I’d like to point out. House of Cakes Dubai has managed to not only steal photos from other cake decorators, but has managed to remove their watermarks and replace them with their own. Read this cake thread to learn more about how the shop reacted once confronted by the true owners of the photos. And finally, read this comment from the House of Cakes owner to truly understand the level of craziness we are dealing with.