Breakfast in Bodmin

Slightly off the web marketing topic - though only slightly mind, I went to Bodmin on Friday morning to meet the business league members there over breakfast, and give a talk about "What is Web 2.0 - and why should i care anyway?".

Well the League group over there meet in the Lanhydrock Golf club and Hotel, and what a lovely spot it is too. The restaurant is the type you would happily pay good money for an evening in: modern, smart, with huge windows looking out over the park, and great food. The members and guests there were a friendly crowd, one or two of whom I had met before, but politely tolerant of my usual excited rant about the possibilities open to businesses using Web 2.0.

But I think Bodmin will go on my list of great breakfast meeting locations, joining in no particluar order:

• Falmouth (where I'm a member), with a view of the sea from the beautiful old Falmouth Hotel, and a breakfast that includes black pudding and hogs pudding!
• St Austell where they meet in another golf club with another sea view across the bay towards Fowey.
• And Bodmin in the fantastic Lanhydrock golf club.
• Penzance - another sea view from the Lugger Hotel.
  

These meetings normally kick off at 7.30 am so you can get back to work by about 9.30, and the ones I have tried include:

• Tuesdays: Truro
• Wednesday: Penzance
• Thursday: Falmouth
• Friday: Bodmin & Redruth.

Anyway thoroughly recommended for good company and a free exchange of ideas, and particularly good for those like me that have only been in Cornwall for a year or so, and therefore still getting to know who everyone is! You can get more information at http://www.thebusinessleague.co.uk if you're interested.

Article Marketing

A great post by Garrett French, introducing Article Marketing, Blogging, and how they can be made to work together.

For the uninitiated this deals with the highly effective technique of writing short articles about your area of expertise, interest or business, and posting them strateguically on the web to help draw visitors and links to your web site....

Article Marketing: "Adding a Blog to Your Article Marketing Strategy
How can a blog best compliment your current article marketing initiative? There are some quick answers, which I'll break out first and foremost in this article. Secondly I'll investigate how you should differentiate your blog posts from your articles.

4 Quick Tips for Integrating a Blog into Your Article Marketing Strategy

1) Put your blog directly on your main site. Put one of your business's main keyword phrases into the title of your blog. Make the url for your blog the name of the blog itself. Frank's Fish Shop's blog url should look something like this, depending on how Frank architects his site: http://AquariumFishToday/FranksFishShop.com.

2) Link to your articles from your blog, even though they are on your site. Don't publish your articles directly in your blog however. Write a little commentary about the article, why you wrote it, what inspired it, who it's for (thx to SEM wiz bw).

3) Link to and mention those who publish your articles. Not the article directories, but rather the websites or newsletters or even other blogs that publish you. Especially if they are useful resources and if you have a decent relationship and or dialogue with the publisher.

4) Discuss responses to your article, whether good or bad in blog posts. Show the how the impact your articles have had on your readers. Show, more importantly, that you're engaged with them.

Differentiating Your Blog Posting and Article Marketing Strategy

A blogging strategy differs significantly from an article marketing strategy, and positions its author differently.

Many writers/marketers simply post entire articles in their blogs. I do, on my article marketing blog, but that's just because I'm not being particularly strategic at the moment. This is not the ideal method if you're looking to maximize the benefit of your blogging and article writing efforts can have on your site's conversions.

These are my opinions about blog posts:

• Blog posts, as a rule, should be shorter than articles and provide bite-sized nuggets of information, usually accompanied by a link.
• Blog posts are great for your quick, from-the-hip reactions/thoughts/opinions to news that affects your industry.
• Blog posts can be chattier in tone, more informal, and perhaps show a bit more of your personality (though your articles should certainly have personality).
• You can write several commentary or "check-out-this-cool-industry-news" blog posts in a tenth of the time it takes to write a decent article.
• Blog posts keep you more regularly in the awareness of your readers/RSS subscribers. Articles are the foundation of your expertise. Blog posts are your constant reminders to others of your expertise.
• Blog posts show your involvement in your industry's conversation, whether you're disagreeing with a colleague's recent article, or lauding an industry player's recent acquisition.

In short, blogs are better for news, commentary and quick analysis while articles are better for establishing your expertise.

This is not entirely a hard and fast rule and should only be followed as a general guideline, especially for those who want to differentiate their blogging efforts from their article marketing efforts.

Executing Your Blogging and Article Marketing Strategy

A dual blogging/article writing strategy is best, as it enables the marketer to position himself as both an industry thought leader by writing great articles and as someone who follows closely the happenings in his industry.

The execution is up to you. Now get writing!

Did your web site not send you flowers this year – AGAIN?

Like all relationships the one with your web site takes a little work to get the very best out of it. In this article I’ll suggest a Dozen red roses that may well improve the quality of your relationship... with your web site.

1. Are you taking an interest in what she’s doing?
If you don’t really take an interest in what she’s doing she is unlikely to be fulfilled by the relationship. By setting up “Google Analytics” you can get a real picture of what’s going on, and find out any potential problems in your relationship, and things you can do to improve it. You can track conversions – which of your visitors actually committed to an action on your site. Take an interest and you’ll understand her much better!

2. All you have to do is ask.
Do you know who is looking for your web site and how? Have you used words on it that people are actually looking for? Most web site owners just guess what to say, based on what they know about their own business. While this is relevant to what you do, what if no-one is searching for that, or almost as bad, there are already 20 million web pages offering exactly the same thing? Web Marketers like us have special tools which tell you what search phrases people are actually using, in what numbers, and how many other sites are after the same visitors. All you have to do is ask, and the visitors can be yours!

3. Be Spontaneous.
Everyone likes a bit of spontaneity, and your site is no different. If you see a topic in your industry that gets you thinking, write it down, blog it, and put it on your site. The search engines have algorithms looking for fresh and topical news, so strike when the iron is hot, and get your topical news up there.

4. Raise the intensity.
Neglect is the curse of a relationship, so don’t do it. Once a week try to get something fresh and interesting posted on your site or blog, and your visitors (and search engines) will love you. After all – why come back to a site where you have already read everything? Raising the intensity of your new posts, to even once a week, will make your web site increasingly popular and successful.

5. Quality Relationships.
Your relationship will bloom if you provide quality time, quality information, and quality content. If your site offers its visitors quality information that adds real value to their search, then their chances of coming back are greatly enhanced. Quality posts may be linked to from other parts of the web, enhancing the traffic to your site. Think about what information you might offer to your visitors, be it gardening tips, recipes, holiday location information. They’ll appreciate it and come to see you again.

6. Being seen in the right places.
Some of us are homebodies at heart, but we also like to be seen in the right places from time to time, be it Ascot, Henley, or just a nice restaurant. Your web site likes to be seen in the right places too, and unlike a cocktail at the Algonquin Hotel, it need not break the bank. One the web one of the best places to be seen is in DMOZ – the Open directory. Google looks at this to work out which sites are authorities. However it can take many months for a site to be checked, and listed, by the real people who edit the directory, so apply for free to get listed today: www.dmoz.org. There’s a pile of other important places for any good social climber to “be seen”, and many of them are free too, so get started with DMOZ and then work through the list.

7. Stop Tarting around!
If she finds you tarting around you’ll get a slap – and your phone number blocked. Listing your site in ”Hundreds of directories for free” does not work, not does buying “Hundreds of incoming links”. Worse still these schemes can get you banned from the three directories that matter – Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Focus on building high quality relationships with relevant sites, and improve the quality of your relationship.

8. Communicate - because Love is a two way thing!
No relationship thrives on take-take-take, and nor does your web site. With the advent of Web 2.0 there are lots of tools allowing your visitors to participate, help each other, give and receive advice relevant to your market place. Putting these tools – like Forums, Comments, Polls, Chat Rooms – on to your site can enhance your content, your visitors’ experience, and your financial results.

9. Are you a one night wonder?
You’ll get no flowers for a one night wonder – unless you’re fantastic of course! Regular communication is the secret of relationship building, so when people come to your site give them something useful or interesting to sign up to for free, so that you can keep on talking and building the relationship. If you’re not doing this then your marketing is a one-shot-wonder, your visitors are unlikely to come back, and your web site will never really love you.

10. Naughty can be nice!
It doesn’t always pay to be goody-two-shoes: perhaps he’ll like you more if you’re naughty? This is a technique that used carefully (you don’t want to be too naughty or you might find yourself in trouble), can yield great results. Posting inflammatory content on your blog can get all sorts of people interested and linking to your site, yielding great results. However there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it, so tread carefully, and remember you really do have to find a way of doing this that doesn’t hurt anyone!

11. Consideration.
Show a little consideration and show what a nice type you are – it works in your favour in the long run. On the web one aspect of this is the accessibility of your site, which can manifest itself in resizable fonts, Alternative text for your images, and a raft of other techniques making your site easier to use for the elderly or the hard of vision. It can cost a little more to set a site up this way, but the benefits can be substantial, and of course – you’re doing the right thing. One really good example of how NOT to do this is my old web site www.channelcomputing.co.uk which rather embarrassingly adheres to none of these principles, and enshrines a large number of other poor practices which you may spot. But it has one saving grace – there is a newer and better successor on the way, so I will eventually start showing a little consideration – I promise!

12. Let her know you love her.
Oh but how can I tell my web site I love it – don’t be so ridiculous. This article has really gone too far now. Well as luck would have it there is a way, several ways in fact. Some of them are called Digg, Squidoo, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and other funny nerdy names. These are the main “Social bookmarking sites”, and the place to go to tell a web site that you love it. You get to share your love with other lovers, and tell them why you love your (or another) site so much. If you haven’t visited these sites yet then have a go, they’re all free to join, very popular, and very effective, so tell a web page you love it, I’m sure there’s plenty to go round!

Well this article is a slightly different approach to the subject of love on the internet isn’t it; what do you think? Is it tacky? Do you pity my girlfriend? Does it stretch an already weak analogy much much too far, or is a humorous, useful reminder of a few things you could be doing better in your business? Do feel free to let us know (politely) – you can comment, criticize, or even Dig it!

Remember though – spend a little attention and time on your relationship with your web site, and you may be receiving flowers next year on Valentines, or perhaps some more visitors, money to buy yourself some flowers even? Who Knows...

Happy Friday!

Internet Marketing - and Web 2.0

So how much does your Internet Marketing course deal with Web 2.0?

Well it is an interesting question, as I've been doing talks on both Web 2.0 and internet marketing for a while now, and there is a significant amount of cross-over between the content of the two presentations.

Web 2.0 is a funny beast - possibly more hype than fact in many ways. Its name implies that the web has changed, and while the web does change every day, there was never a step. With regards to marketing a business, the core values have never changed, and if I were to paraphrase people with much longer histories than myself in the Internet marketing game I would say the process consists of:

1. Find out what people are searching for on line.
2. Find a solution that meets their needs.
3. Offer that solution.

OK that was the difficult bit, it gets easier from here:

4. Write compelling sales copy that leads towards a sale.
5. Bring people quickly to your site with PPC advertising.
6. Learn which keywords actually lead to sales.
7. Optimise your site for those keywords to bring the longer term and higher volume organic search traffic.
8. Build content and links, then more content and more links to bring that traffic your way.
9. Bring your visitors back many times using social networking and Email Marketing.
10. Develop credibility and trust to build a strong relationship.
11. Sell to your people what you know they need, and then sell them more based on your knowledge of them.

Which brings us back to Web 2.0.
So if those are the basics, where does Web 2.0 fit in?

Well here are some of the topics that we cover that are "Very Web 2.0"

The aspects of web 2.0 that we deal with, as supporting increased profits from a business web site include:
1. Using Social sites for developing high quality inbound links and traffic to your web site.
2. Using blogging to attract the attention of search engines, and for a more relaxed approach to developing the relationship with your customer.
3. API based tools including the Keyword research tools are very web 2.0, and they provide us with vital information about who is searching for our product or service, and allow us to understand how to alter our web sites in order to bring that traffic to us.
4. Tagging and cloud type components that make our sites more accessible to search engines.
5. Forums and Wikis that help us provide valuable and fresh content to our users, and to develop our sites with user generated content. This reduces the effort involved in keeping our sites clean and fresh.
6. Using RSS and syndication both to add relevant content to our own sites, and to add incoming links, traffic and improved Pagerank to our own sites.
7. Using Tagging and Linking sites such as Digg, Technorati and Squidoo and others to increase traffic and sales to our sites.
8. Turning one-time visitors into long term customers and friends using social networking as a relationship building tool.
9. Applying web 2.0-type standards to the design of our sites to improve the user’s experience, accessibility, and search engine ranking.
10. Using techniques that can turn our marketing tactics viral – i.e. to make our promotions spiral outwards on the net with little or no effort of our own. When these are applied correctly they can exponentially increase the success of a site.
11. Effective use of press release and Article marketing to increase page rank, traffic, and sales.

Link to the "Channel Computing - Internet Marketing Course" page.

For those that are still guessing I think we'll have another post now, entitled "what is Web 2.0?"... because most are by no means certain!

Social Networking with Training Wheels

This is a post by John Jantsch on ducttapemarketing.com, which I republish in its entirety because:

a. Its gives a great summary of how a business would get started in "Social networking", and
b. I'm a bit busy today to write anything of my own for the blog!

I would however mention that this article's premise is that most of the benefits of "Social networking" are in the future, and that perhaps at the moment there is not much to be gained directly from participation. We would take a different approach to that, and find that good use of social networking is already a powerful tool for generating traffic, interest, and sales, from your web activities.

Please read and enjoy,
Pete

Social Networking with Training Wheels: "Look, I don’t really think that the mySpaces and Facebooks of the world are that important for the typical small business as they stand today. There may be very practical business reasons for some to actually use these and other, what are called social networks, for business gain, but most people that have jumped on the social network bandwagon have found themselves left with a “is this all there is” kind of feeling."

To those I say this, the value of the current public social networks for business folks is not what you can get out of them for gain today, but what you can learn by using them for practical gain tomorrow. That’s why SpacebookedIn makes sense for you now

The Facebooks of the world are busy teaching millions and millions of business folks how social networks work, how social networking works, how shared applications can be viral and ever-present. The real payoff in my opinion is that the wave to come after the Facebook bubble bursts is the “personalized business network.” Once everyone of your customers and prospects knows how to use what are easily replicatable social networking tools, like building profiles, sharing video and connecting based on mutual interests, your job of building your own social business network around your own very specific community of niche will get a whole lot easier.

2008 will be the year of the personalized social business network. So, if you've decided to take a pass on the whole social networking trend, I would suggest that you use this handy list to start learning to ride this bike with the training wheels on.

Ten ways to get started with Social Networking.

1) Read 10 blogs - sign-up for a Bloglines account and search for and subscribe to 10 blogs about social networking - you can return daily to your page on Bloglines to find and read all the new content on your 10. Of course you can add blogs about your industry and interests here too.

2) Comment on 10 blogs - posting relevant comments to blogs you read is a very simple form of social networking. It's also a good way to get some extra visitors your site or blog.

3) Join Facebook - Join and create a profile. Find and friend some of your existing contacts using tools on Facebook. You'll be surprised how many people you already know have Facebook accounts. Facebook has some real value for you because of the rich set of tools and large amount of active users. This is a great place to experiment with how people interact in social networks. Once you get your feet wet you may also find that Facebook is a great way to connect with business contacts you may never bump into otherwise.

4) Create a mySpace page - this service is really embraced primarily by musicians and the younger set. It also happens to have a large underbelly contingent so be warned, but it is a great tool for learning how to build a presence outside of your web site.

5) Join LinkedIn - this is a service that's been called Facebook for business. It is really about meeting and connecting with like-minded business folks. It is a great service for people looking for a job or to make connections with people who may be out of reach without an introduction.

6) Visit Ning - this is the largest custom social networking service that allows you to create your own community using a variety of tools that can be branded to match your current site.

7) Create a Workbench profile - this one's a little self-serving as this is my new social business networking site but it's a good example of the personalized business community that's the next wave for small business.

8) Create a Twitter account - this tool is pretty silly on the surface, it allows you to type in 160 characters or less what you are doing right now. It feels like a giant waste of time but a very large and active community has grown around this kind of micro-blogging and you should understand how people are using it.

9) Create a StumbledUpon profile - This is a social network built around discovering and recommending sites that you like. Active stumblers can send a lot of traffic your way

10) Create a Digg account - this site allows you to keep up to the minute with what's happening in the world of business. Users submit and vote on what is believed to be the most important content.

You might also consider Mixx, Squidoo and Flikr as places to find and develop niche related communities when you're ready to really get out there.

Think of mySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook as your labs - get in there and experiment for the future. then start planning your own personalized social business network.

Six tips for easier and more effective blogging...

Just published this on e-Cademy in answer to a question, thought it should be on here too. It is a few ideas that I like to use, and which may help make your blogging easier and more effective....

1. Subscribe to "Google Alerts" for a couple of key-phrases related to your area of interest. For example if I were doing SEO for a cornish hotel I might subscribe to an alert for "Hotel Cornwall", "Tourism South West England" or similar. Then each day or week (as I choose) I get an alert telling me any sites which have added new content on my topic. I can quickly click through to those sites and see what they are writing about. (Incidentally I did find at one point that by subscribing to an alert for just "Cornwall", most of the information that arrived was either about Camilla Duchess of, or news about the quangos that seem so common in this part of the world!)

2. If I really like an article and I blog through "blogger.com" (which is a very easy and free one to use) I can right click on text in the article, select "send to / blog", and the content will be instantly added to my blog as a new post. What - isn't that plagiarism? No its the food on which the web thrives - linking. The publisher has given me some relevant content for my blog, but I have given them a link back to theirs. Its a fair trade from which both of us benefit.

3. If I really like the content from another blog I can subscribe to its RSS feed, and get all its new stories. These may either be published on my blog, or sent to my inbox just to keep me up to date.

4. However your blog still needs some unique content - you can't survive only on linking in to relevant content from elsewhere. When your Google alert arrives and the post you see provokes a thought that you can see may be of interest to your readers, then write. At the end of the day it is only your self-discipline that will get you regularly writing original posts and truly feeding your market (or potential market) with quality, original content.

5. Now back to the Google alert. Once you have some original content posted in your blog and used a few other techniques to get the traffic and subscribers coming, you may start to get back Google alerts of your own content. The ultimate validation of your own content is when hundreds of other sites begin to link to it, propelling your blog and your business to the top of Google for your key-phrases. The alerts will tell you when those back-links start to come - its a good feeling!

6. I'd finally like to refer you to my recent blog post about the power of high quality blogging content, and the man that made it work with spectacular results. This type of writing is one example of what is called "Link Bait", but its well worth understanding how that works: The power of high quality internet content - Channel Computing blog.

Hope that lot makes your blogging a little easier and more effective, there's certainly few ways of keeping up with latest developments as easily.

Good luck,
Pete

Good Blogging: the power of quality content...

This post is to share a fantastic example of how high quality content in a blog or web site can propel a company's site to the top of Google....

The story is now a well documented one, about a resourceful chap called Cameron Olthuis, who wrote an article so good that it propelled his company to the top of the Google rankings for one of the more competitive key-phrases on the web - "Life Insurance". The sales impact of a strategy like this could potentially be measured in the millions, and the strategy is as easy to implement for a samrt small business as it is for a multi-national corporation.

Please read and enjoy this Forbes article, and remember its key message which might be paraphrased as "Content is King"!

Digg this headline - Forbes.com: "If you visited the news site Digg.com on Tuesday afternoon, you likely spotted quirky news stories chosen by the site's largely 18- to 24-year-old male audience, including 'Woman Steals Man's Genitals' and 'Mother Gives Birth Then Flushes Twins Down Toilet.' But an audience of search marketers examining Digg at a conference the same day saw something else: a goldmine of lucrative Web traffic. 'Social media' sites like Digg, Reddit.com and Newsvine.com let users submit and rank news headlines and other links to sites around the Web.

Sites voted to the top of these news aggregators receive tens of thousands of visitors. But the online marketing professionals gathered at New York's Search Marketing Expo this week were interested in tapping into a different feature of these sites: their growing power to affect Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) and Yahoo!'s (nasdaq: YHOO- news - people ) search results. Take, for instance, an example provided by one of the conference's speakers, Cameron Olthuis. In January, Olthuis was hired by LifeInsure.com to tackle what many would see as an impossible project: sparking a viral marketing campaign around the topic of life insurance. Olthuis' solution? He created a page on LifeInsure's site listing '19 Things You Probably Don't Know About Death,' and posted it to Digg."

Read how it went here....