tips, tricks, ideas, thoughts

Life in the fast lane of the information highway

Sun, 6 Dec 2009 00:16:46 +0000

IMAGINE that having a website is like owning a car. Before you buy one you have to decide what you want and what you need.
 Should it be fast, economical, luxurious, basic, flash, powerful, loaded with gadgets etc? All these factors will affect the cost of your car; some cars have great engines but don't look good, some cars look great but don't have all the gadgets.

Websites are much the same. You may have a fantastic e-commerce or content management system but the front end of the site - the bit your clients see - may look basic or, dare I say, unprofessional.   Let's go back to the car analogy. You could buy a middle of the range car with an average engine and then spend money later adding skirts, spoilers, decals and a great paint job.  Or you could go for the whole package and get a luxury fast car that comes with all the whistles and bells. It depends on what you need and what you can afford. Remember some cars can be upgraded later with extra gadgets and even a more powerful engine. Just like a website.  Think back to when you bought your first car - it was probably the best you could afford at the time to get the job done.  But cars age and technology moves fast, so that car you bought with the CD player could well now benefit from being able to connect to your iPod. You might even decide after a few years you need a bigger boot and more storage space. Just like a website.  Usability is important. When I was younger, I owned a car with a door you had to lift to unlock it. I had to pump the gas three times before turning the ignition and only then would it start.   What if your website worked the same way? If you gave a visitor the keys, do you think they would be able to get the car started? A website - like a car - should work the way we expect it to.   Someone recently told me he hated the fact that so many websites look the same! You could argue the same with cars, after all they usually have four wheels, headlights, brake lights, a steering wheel and an engine.
 Most of them put things in the same place, too, but this is for the user's benefit. As soon as you move the ignition to the middle of the car (like Saab did) or the gears to a lever on the steering column then people get confused and are invariably put off.  Websites are the same. Usability means common factors like logos, navigation, site maps and home buttons should be in a standard place.   That's not to say innovation doesn't have its place, but innovation needs to be intuitive and when it's not it can cause more harm than good.  What would you think if you went to buy a car and it had the spare wheel on the roof, eight headlamps and six narrow doors? That's the kind of user issues some badly-designed websites create.
 Now let's consider maintenance. You wouldn't expect your car to run forever without looking after it, and you don't expect all external factors to stay the same.   You know that if you don't change the oil from time to time the engine will break. And if a new law regulates emissions, or your car gets so old the manufacturer stops making spare parts, then things need to change.
 It's exactly the same with a website. If you don't clean your database from time to time, or Google changes the way it looks at a site for indexing, then your site won't be as effective as it once was.   Here's a trickier concept to grasp, but persevere because marketing a website correctly is crucial. it's a very important point. Imagine your pockets are deep enough to run a Formula 1 car, your team hires the best driver and invests a fortune making sure the car's technology will make it perform to the highest standards.  The only problem is that one team doesn't know what the next team is doing to ensure they are in with a chance of winning. Odds are the team with the best driver and best car will win, although the mix might be the best car with a good driver just keeps up with the best driver with a good car.  Well, it's the same principle with search engine optimisation. You might spend lots on getting the structure of your website 100% right for Google but with an average digital marketer (the driver) implementing the search engine strategy your results might not be fantastic.  Mind you, you might get the best SEO and the best marketer and still find someone else is doing it better. Perhaps they had more money to spend on a link-building campaign.  Finally there comes a time when you need to change your car. Maybe you got bored with it, maybe you need a bigger one or perhaps you need to make a better impression when you pull up at your client's office.   For these same reasons you will need to change your website, too. Life moves fast online, keeping up is not easy - but sometimes it is necessary. The bad news is that one year of website life is like three car years, so you will have to change your site more often than you would like.  But at least you'll keep ahead of all the others on the information highway.

Global Brand Forum 2009 at Cass Business School, London, UK

Tue, 8 Sep 2009 22:15:32 +0100

Erich Joachimsthaler
Vivaldi Partners

My father says I have an answer for everything!

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 08:22:32 +0100

I thought I should put this to good use. After working online since 1995 and hands on marketing for over two decades I have the answers your members need in order to maximise the online presence and ensure a return in there online marketing spend.

I take a holistic approach to online strategy and marketing. It is one thing to drive traffic to a website, it is another to ensure that website will give you quality conversions.

When you consults with a search engine expert they will tell you search engine optimisation is the solution to generating business from your website, a social media expert will tell you how Facebook or Linkedin are the be all and end all of successful website. After 15 years consulting and running online marketing campaigns I know that sometimes businesses require a broader range of options to ensure they spend their marketing budgets most effectively.

After recently completing the internet marketing chapters of the GMN, Anglia Ruskin & BPP’s new Masters qualification in marketing I feel I am qualified to pass on the secrets of internet marketing professionals

When was the idea of the world wide web first started
Who invented the internet
How many people in the world have internet access
How much money is spent on internet advertising in the UK
What is Web 2.0
What is a website DNS
What is the best way to manage a domain name
How important is website usability
What are the top 10 guidelines for usability
What are the advantages and disadvantages of building a website inhouse
What is the difference between an intranet and an extranet
What are the benefits of a content managed website
How do I select a web agency to build my web site
How long does it take to build a website
What technology should I have my website built in
How much does a website cost
How long does it take to build a website
What is the average time a visitors spends on a website
How many pages does a visitor typically read on a website
What is the best website analytics tool
How do I choose my online strategy
What do I need to know about web hosting
What are the top 10 online marketing tactics
Why do I need search engine optimisation
What are the key areas of search engine optimisation
What is on page optimisation
What is off page optimisation
What is keyword density and why is it important
What are H tags
What are Meta Tags
What are ALT tags
What is an optmised URL
How do I choose the right keywords for my site
What is a keyword cloudmap
What is a SERPS report
What happens if I get the wrong keywords
What is link building
Why is link building good for my website
What is the difference between inbound and outbound links
What is contextual linking
What is pagerank
How does pagerank work
How do I carry out an online competitor analysis
How can I make money from the web
What is proactive online marketing
What is reactive online marketing
What is a website technical audit for
What is HTML validation and is it important
What is a XML sitemap for
What is a Robots.txt
What is PPC
What is Adwords CTR & CPC
What is the benefit of Google adwords
What percentage of searches go through Google
What are the top 5 search engines
What is Bing
What is the average pixel size of a monitor
What is multi-variant testing
How to I track conversions on my website and there sources
How can I see who has been visiting my website
How much money is spent on Google Adwords each year
What is PPA on Google Adwords
What is Googles content network
What is Google Adsense
Why is a landing page important on PPC
What is SMO
What is RSS
How do you choose a social media strategy
What is the best way to blog for business
What is Micro Blogging
How can I leverage twitter for business
What is Digg and Del.icio.us for
How to I increase relevant traffic to my website
How may page impressions does facebook get
How many people subscribe to facebook in the UK
How many directors and CEO’s are on facebook in the UK
How many visits does facebook get each month
What are web forums for
What are the benefits of social bookmarking
What is an online press release
What is the best way to right an online press release
What is affiliate marketing and how does it work
What are the benefits and disadvantages of banner advertising
How does email marketing work
What is the the average open rate in a mass email
How do I avoid my email being considered spam
How do I create a viral marketing campaign
What is the most successful viral campaign
How does online marketing compare with traditional marketing tactics
How much money was spent on christmas day last year
How do I work out my cost per acquisition cost
What makes a successful e-commerce site
What is the split of browser usage in the web
How do you track inbound phone calls generated by the web
How do you market business to business services on the web
How does the internet work
How do people find me on the internet
What is post click marketing
What is an eye tracking test for
What is it that you do not know that you do not know

As a professional speaker I know I’m expected to have all the answers, and event though I don’t have them all, I do have for the 100 above and many more.

To make a booking please call 07770 381 881 or email me on dsegal@me.com

Why should we keep marketing if no one is buying anything?

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:43:37 +0000

You're likely to be sitting in one of three camps.

Camp one: you have a fantastic brand and feel you can make sweeping marketing cutbacks as the brand is strong enough to sell itself even through the downturn.

Camp two: you are a midsize company and are concerned that if you don't make cutbacks, or find a marketing solution that works, your business is going to suffer.

Camp three: you have a small business and have no choice but to find ways to save money and marketing seems like the simplest place to start.

All three ways of thinking are wrong. I know you're thinking I'm a marketer so I would say that, so here's why.

If marketing budgets are cut all that really happens is this money is reallocated elsewhere. It then becomes a huge challenge to try to get your budgets increased again later. Even big brands require marketing through a downturn. It's a basic marketing principle, if people are not told that your service or your product are there, the chances are they will be told about someone else's. Then you will happen lose market share and that's the worst thing to lose right now.

A downturn is the time to refocus your marketing budgets, not cut them. In a survey carried out by MarketingSherpa, 39% of large companies in the US had made cutbacks in marketing by March 08 whilst only 6% of small business had made a cut. In fact, 20% of small businesses had increased their marketing budget. There was a 36% reduction in traditional marketing against a 17% reduction in online marketing. You may be surprised (I'm not) that 83% of businesses maintained or increased their online marketing.

The reason for this is that internet marketing is far more cost efficient than traditional methods and it is far easier to measure your return on investment . The biggest increases are in mass emailing the in-house customer lists, paid search e.g. Google adwords and Social Media Optimisation. Other things like running virtual events, webcasts and interactive training will also greatly reduce strain on marketing budgets. Rather than inviting 100 of your clients to a venue to see your latest product, you can show them on an interactive webcast. Saving all the costs associated with the live event, food, venue hire, accommodation etc.

By ensuring your website is well designed not only visually but from an intelligent operating point of view, you can manage visitors through the site to your end goal. Then by driving traffic to the site, it can only go to increase awareness and ultimately sales. At AGI we recently optimised and redesigned a site that eight weeks later had a 97% increase in organic search traffic with people spending 58% more time on the site! By tracking the revenue generated from online marketing carefully, our client has had an increase in revenue of over 500%! The only reason marketing budgets get cut is because ROI is not measured properly and CFOs can not see the value in marketing. Show a CFO results like this and it becomes a no brainer.

To compare the value of traditional marketing vs online I have prepared some figures below:

A quarter page advert in HELLO magazine is £6,435 vs a full SMO (Social Media Optimisation) campaign, reaching 15 social sites, 12 forums, 2 press releases, 100 social bookmarks, all posts, profile management and reporting which can be done for about £5,500 per month.

Four Billboards for one month cost £3,200 vs £3,200 per month to fund a small Pay Per Click campaign, Search Engine Optimiation and Link building campaign.

A full page - firm day in The Sun is £55,502, read by 8 million readers a day, possibly leading to 1-2% traffic to a site vs £55,000 in a Pay Per Click campaign at £1 per click which will give you 55,000 visits.

100,000 postcards printed and posted cost approx £30,000 vs 100,000 direct e-mails for less than £10,000

As you can see online marketing gives you more bang for your bucks. It will also keep your visibility at a higher level. The traditional marketing methods are often short lived - for example the advert in the Sun is simply for one day!

In Summary

Cutting marketing budgets is bad. If you can't up them, then at least sustain them and get them focused on some investment-returning activity. In this unfortunate economy this is the time to grab market share. This way when the market does start to pick up your business will clearly be ahead of the curve, rather than in a position of having to ramp up marketing and fight to reclaim what was lost.

Don't be a lemming and jump into cutbacks just because you see your competitors doing so. Look at Steve Jobs and Apple: in an interview with Fortune magazine, Jobs stressed his determination to continue to invest through the economic downturn. He said: "We`ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company then was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous effort to get them into Apple in the first place."

Jobs added: "In fact, we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that`s exactly what we'll do this time.

The result of that R&D was of course the iPod and the iPhone. Judge for yourself if Jobs made the

PageRank (PR)

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:07:12 +0100

PR stands for Public Relations. It also stands for Proportional Representation. But in the world of internet marketing, PR means PageRank. And it is the key to successful exploitation of the internet.

So what is it and what does it do? First the technical bit:

The PageRank algorithm (a sequence of instructions, basically) was originally created at Stanford University by Larry Page hence it is called PageRank, or at least that’s what it says in The Google Story, by David Vise and Mark Malseed (2005).

What is it for?

Google assigns to your web page an importance in the form of a numeric representation (from 0 to 10), 10 being the highest value. There are not many PR10 sites, but here is a list of some of them from which you’ll see that a PR10 site is pretty important.

Adobe - http://www.adobe.com/
World Wide Web Consortium - http://www.w3.org/
Google Search http://www.google.com
National Science Foundation - http://www.nsf.gov
The White House - http://www.whitehouse.gov
US Government website - http://www.usa.gov/

So the real question is how does it work? Well in simple terms Google thinks that when one page links to another page, it is casting a "vote" for that other page. The more "votes" a page has, the more important the page.

What makes it more interesting is that not all "voters" are equal. The importance of the page that's casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. So the higher the PR of the page that's casting the vote, the more that vote is worth to your page.

It’s a bit like The X Factor on TV: A vote from Simon Cowell carries a lot more weight in the music business than a vote from Cheryl Cole.

Below is a more technical explanation for those of you who are that way inclined. If you’re not, skip on a paragraph or two!

Page Rank Example

Welcome back to the non-tech world, dear readers.

Simply put, the more links a page has going out the less valuable those links become to the site they are linking to. So if you have one link going from a PageRank 3 page to your website that is a good link.

If you had a link to your site from a PageRank 8 page, but there are 100 other links from this page, you would be sharing the link value of that page with 100 other sites meaning the PR3 page would actually be a better vote for your site. Where as the more links you have coming into a page, the higher that page’s PageRank will become.

PageRank is also affected by the internal linking structure of your website. This works very much like the external links calculation above. Each internal page has a PageRank that can be used to vote for other pages on your website.

So as you can see, link strategies can be quite complex. Another factor in this scenario is that the more pages you have on a site the more pages that can vote for other internal pages. So the more pages you have, the higher your site’s PageRank can become.

Outbound links from your page leak PageRank. There are a few ways of stopping this from happening. The best way is to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute e.g. link text. This will tell Google not to pass any of your page’s rank to the linked page.

Google will still actually follow the link and if the page it is linked to it in Google’s directory, it will still reindex the page. This attribute is commonly used on Blog sites to stop spam blogging (where people post blogs or entries on forums, guest books, wikis etc. with links to commercially promote their site and help generate additional PR for their site.)

In summary:

PageRank is Google's way of deciding how important your website is. 0 is the lowest PageRank, while 10 is the highest. A higher PageRank can seriously affect your search engine position.

The more links from high PageRank pages your site has, the greater its importance in Google. The more links internally to your pages, the more important certain pages on your site will be.