Digital Britain unconferences

The state of the broadband nation here in the UK is now approaching dire. Despite the spin and advertising millions, the reality on the ground is that many suffer impoverished braodband connections, and there is little chance of the telcos providing broadband appropriate for the 21st century (FTTH) before the 2012 Olympics to anyone other than a handful of foreign athletes and journalists.

Britain is getting left behind in the broadband race. We seem unable to force private companies to act for the common good in providing broadband to the masses, or even acknowledge the problem, and swathes of the country, especially rural areas, are still unable to get anything close to what other nations would call broadband, even in 2009.

FTTH is being sidelined for yet another interim technology, fibre to the copper/cabinet or FTTC, which will no more provide suitable communications infrastructure for this nation than the asymmetrical connectivity provided to date, (ADSL) and labelled (mistakenly) and (mis)sold as "broadband".

The Carter Report on Digital Britain has been through public review after the recent publication of the interim report, the Digital Britain Summit has been held to inform and enlighten the lucky few who got a seat in the British Library or who could access the online video stream of current thinking, whilst awaiting the publication of the full Digital Britain Report in May.

The problem is though that Joe Public is fed up with reports and summits, policy and regulation, pilots and trials, all of which generally cost a fortune to us the taxpayers and frequently achieve nothing except backwards movement down the FTTH or true broadband path.

The Digital Britain Twitter backchannel during the Summit was alive with pain, frustration, exasperation as well as innovative ideas, positivity for community action, broadband expertise, FTTH and telco knowledge, and much more.

For the latter half of the Digital Britain conference, there was at least a factor of 10 higher attendees on the Twitter #digitalbritain channel than in the venue. And probably far more due to Stephen Fry's attendance and involvement.

In response to that, it was inevitable that the Digital Britain unconference would be organised by people who are far more digitally aware than many at policy and decision making level. Those people will ignore the Digital Britain unconferences at their peril, be they in government, the civil service or telcos.

There are far too many people for whom this issue can be life or death:

* personally, because of the lack of telemedicine
* to their businesses, because they are unable to communicate with or participate in the global economy and in too many cases with the local economy
* to their communities, who are becoming increasingly cut off and isolated from the internet-driven world because of the lack of broadband
* to their familes as arguments and suffering occur due to lack of access for schooling, leisure, work opportunities
* to the environment as we continue to be unable to fully implement teleworking or reduce enviro-impact through the adoption of green technologies or reduced energy consumption which FTTH brings

The Digital Britain unconference idea is a natural reaction to the situation which is being foced on the consumers, citizens and businesses of the UK. It highlights what many of us are saying that BROADBAND IS VITAL.

Wherever you are in Britain, please attend one of the broadband unconferences, either in person or online through the Digital Britain Unconference Twitter channel, and promote these events as widely as possible.

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Leyland tiger vintage bus in the Lake District on BBC breakfast news

Click here for Cumbria Classic Coaches website

Nothing wakes you up quite so much as seeing one of the companies you have been involved in on BBC breakfast news. After all, there aren't that many companies in the UK who hire out vintage and classic buses, nor who have a 1949 Leyland Tiger, better known as the Kendal Klipper.

All jokes about "Will's on the bus" should be put on hold, whilst we promote this family run bus company based in Cumbria, with one of their fleet currently loitering around Glenridding and equally beautiful places, full of people suffering from the effects of the current economic climate. From people who had moved to their dream retirement in Spain and who have been forced to come home and rent a house in Carlisle, through to other hard working folk who have seen their savings and wages decrease to little or nothing.

Nice juxtaposition of a 1940s bus with current economic issues, and the Lakes make an ideal setting for all of this news story. We await the next installment tomorrow with interest, and of course, a personal delight at seeing Cumbria Classic Coaches on mainstream TV. The double decker is in Birmingham at the NEC and is apparently the star of that show.

However, from a promotional point of view, there is of course a salutory story behind all of this blog post. A job, whether for the BBC Breakfast news team, a wedding or private hire, is always also potentially an opportunity to market your business online. CCC should have had a headline story or a landing page up designed to capture those who are looking on the search engines for an old bus or classic coach to hire for weddings, parties or to enjoy a trip through the Yorkshire Dales and Lake District on one of the heritage routes.

You are bound to get casual visitors following up news stories and so on, so you don't necessarily want to inundate your usual website and home page with people who just want an authentic bus ticket, so a landing page is perfect. Set it up to capture anyone coming in from the particular TV or radio station, news article etc and give them all the info that they may be seeking to ensure you weed out the serious business enquiries from those just interested because you have a great product that has caught their fancy this fine morning.

Add all the keywords and phrases to your landing page that will hit the search engines, and Digg it, add it to Facebook and social network sites, and submit to the channel or publication showing/publishing your details for a great roundabout marketing mechanism.

And then of course, contact all of your fan club and get them to post a link. Like this blog post!!! Here is the link to BBC Breakfast News and hopefully shortly there will be a video clip or similar showing Cumbria Classic Coaches.

Aside: Was Pete Blezzard really asleep in that last clip?!!

UPDATE:Just over one hour after posting this, I checked Google for some long tail terms to see how we were doing.
#1: bbc breakfast old bus lakes
#1:BBC breakfast vintage bus
#1: pete blezard bus
#3: bbc news old bus cumbria
#3: pete blezzard
#6: bbc news bus lake district
#7: bbc news lake district bus
#9: bbc news bus cumbria (#10 Cumbria classic coaches!!)
#11: bbc breakfast bus

Thinking about what people might search on has brought up terms such as credit crisis, economic situation, economy and much more about the actual story, but I wasn't taking much notice of the financial and economic reasons for the bus being used on TV!!

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Domain Renewal group warning

Been a while since I have been hit with this particular scam. Offical looking letter, lots of small print, sent at a time when a domain is up for renewal. But, it certainly isn't due up for renewal with these guys.

Small businesses often fall victim to this type of scam which is asking for a mere £20 payment for a 1 year renewal of what could potentially be a vital domain name. £65 for 5 years.

Last time I got hit for it was on a .eu domain that I had purposely registered for 1 year as I knew that was the timescale/lifespan of a particular set of keywords we were using. The letters got increasingly unpleasant, and I got bored of scanning (OCR) Flemish and french legalese to realise it was easier to hit 'shred' not scan.

All that is actually being requested with this particular letter is that you switch your DOMAIN REGISTRAR to this particualr company. And as I am perfectly happy with my domain registrar, who send timely reminders, allow me a fantastically useful dashboard to edit all my accounts, cancel domains, renew them, set up web and email forwarding (for the purposes of impartiality, they shall remain nameless - you can find out in about 30secs!), this is yet another letter that is going in the bin.

This cross-marketing of web to post is now becoming as tedious as many of the other idiocies of our daily lives where someone seeks to make a quick buck out of our information overload.

Make a note of where you have registered your domains, make sure that it is easy to find if your secretary leaves, and never, ever, respond to anything like this. As they seem to be targetting .com domains due to expire in the next few months, I look forward to many more. Not.

Update: Oh, and I know it is petty but writing, "No bloody chance" and sticking it back in their envelope with a 1p stamp on doesn't half feel good for the soul!

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Never assume everyone knows what you do

Today's lesson is about writing down what you know to share, or showing someone else because you have no idea how much you have learnt over the years that could be useful to those around you.

This lesson came about today when twin 1 came to the town centre with me, and I threw her out of the car to buy the parking ticket for the car park. At 15, I wasn't really expecting her to wail, "How do I use this machine? And which machine is it?" I pointed out that one of the items in question was actually a litter bin....but I was quite surprised, but on reflection, why should she know how to buy a parking ticket? She doesn't drive.

She said, as she climbed back in the car and clutching her prized acquisition, "Cool. They should teach us that sort of stuff in school." Good point actually, you mean they don't?!

The lesson continued after we had arrived back home and twin 2, declaring mass hunger, decided she would make a spam sandwich. But how to open the tin? Just before she mullered the key in riving it off the bottom of the tin, I decided that it would be worth showing her the technique before it was too late. OK, she refused to listen once I had got it started (she is a teenager after all!), but she did finally get into the tin. And repeated, almost word for word, what her sister had said earlier, "They should teach us this sort of stuff in school." (Well, they are twins!)

End result for me - win, win. Twin 1 can buy the parking tickets at future, twin 2 can no longer say she doesn't know how to open a tin of spam/sardines etc, and best of all, I got a sandwich made for me!

So, moral of the story is don't assume everyone knows how to do the things you have learnt to do over the years, and by sharing what you do know with others, you can often find mutual benefits.

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Promote your blog

The guys at Bloggeries are avid users of Twitter and understand the need to get the word out there about your blog or RSS feed. Use their service today to get traffic to your blog and ensure that your 2009 marketing strategy starts as you mean it to go on.

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"We had a funeral for his snowman"

"We had a funeral for his snowman" is the sort of headline most copywriters wish they could write. In fact, most copywriters would chew their own leg off to come up with something that powerful!

This poignant, short resume of the life, and death, of a child's snowman begins with those 7 words which make you just want to read the rest. And once read, those few paragraphs will probably stick in your head for a very long time, if not forever. After all, not many of us have mourned a snowman as this child did. Nor related this sort of experience to our every day life as those in the comments did.

Internet marketers have been experimenting with writing catchy subject lines and headlines for their emails recently, but have generally failed to have the success this one did. Surprisingly, the emails from the supposed IM gurus are easy to find in my inbox as they are all unread. With subject lines such as "flying panda curse" and "over inflated clam", I guess it is hardly surprising when compared to "We had a funeral for his snowman".

Writing to capture the attention of your readers is one thing, but writing with passion is what will actually really hold them, and stick in their minds. Not every email or blog post or tweet needs to be attempting to flog your audience a product. Most people can see through that. Amy's name will stick in many people's minds when they think, "I need a good copywriter or blogger" because in this simple post she has proven she knows her trade/art, call it what you will. And that is a more effective sales pitch than any.

So, when you need to write copy for your site, don't think SEO, or keywords, or sales pitch - think passion and emotion.

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Wot economic recession?

I don't really do Christmas or shopping. But I am watching what is happening with the economy for my clients and my own business in 2009. So, I was more than a little surprised to see the queues, lack of bargains and spending mania going on today in Kendal. Not what I had heard on the BBC news....

Retailers in small market towns, such as Kendal, seem to have it made. It was blatantly obvious today that the ONLY companies with bargains, sales, reductions etc were the national companies who are reacting on a national policy basis. "The following items are to be marked down, the following signs need to go on the windows etc" And Woolworths, who of course have their very own problems with administration etc.

The local companies are retailing at full bore with very few reductions being offered. After all, they already have a good brand reputation locally or they wouldn't still be on the high street. Their customers will continue coming in through the door - sales signs or not.

Boots, Morrisons, Comet etc all had sale signs up. Yet, those were the sales staff who were quick to say, "The Boxing Day sales start in just 3 days. If it's not a present for Xmas Day, you might want to consider waiting because the price on that will come down."

I thought this was really interesting. Here in Cumbria, only one local company I know of has gone to the wall recently with the loss of 30+ jobs, but the local rumour mill has it that it is unrelated to any recession.

But no-one else seems to be really suffering yet. The drop in mortgage rates has helped those who have low average earnings, which is typical for rural areas such as ours, not hindered them. So, spending is rife not restricted. The poultry sale the other night at the auction mart saw fresh 6kg turkeys being sold between £32 and £40+, and geese anywhere up to £60. No going to Asda, for a packed crowd who jostled for the birds even though they were anywhere up to 5 times or so what the supermarkets have been knocking them out at.

Was it just down to quality and the knowledge they were well bred, locally? I think so. I also think there is an innate understanding of the blue pound in rural economies. (Oh, and ignore Wikipedia, which whilst coming up first on Google for the term "blue pound", is way off the mark).

Blue pound refers to a theory that if a pound coin were stained blue and its progress was observed, we would see how much of our money spent 'locally' was actually benefiting the local economy. If the paint comes off on each person's hands as they touch it within the local spending community, how many people will have their hands dyed blue before this pound coin leaves the community for a national or international corporate? For the vitality and ressurection of communities, this phenomenon is SO important. If all your money is going out of the local economy, it is called the leaky bucket syndrome. If it is staying within the economy, it is creating local jobs, giving local people money to spend, and it invigorates local communities.

Let me put this really simply: it keeps alive the place where you live, keeps your neighbours and yourself in work, it ensures the future of your community. Think about where your blue pound goes every single time you open your purse or wallet. Is that pound leaving where you live and going into the coffers of a large corporate who will not be spending their profits on your doorstep? Then, to be honest, you are helping to destroy your community.

So, to return to the main point of this post, where is the business and marketing lesson in this? It has to be:
if you have a good relationship with your customers because you provide a good product, at a good price, all year round, and great customer service, you can survive a recession. Especially if you don't follow the rest of the sheep and cut prices to attract more sales. Either your product is great and worth the money, or you have your pricing structure wrong!

We are likely to see a large number of retail redundancies and bankruptcies during 2009 in the High street according to many financial analysts.

This could well to prove to be a good thing for those looking to re-establish the High Street as their domain, and to take Britain's high streets from being the 'same shops everywhere, homogenous' crap that we have seen developing and endured in some towns.

IF some of the larger names start vanishing from the High Street, there is a fantastic opportunity for local companies and smaller chains to move in and deliver the goods where there is maximum footfall. Obviously, as an Internet marketer, I have to apply what I know from there to this process so here's my thoughts for 2009 on how to maximise on the potential changes in every High Street in Britain.

* Build your loyal customer base online
* Have a great website, lots of content and product choice
* Keep up to date with your customers - email newsletters, autoresponders, competitions and so on
* Deliver the BEST customer service that you possibly can - use live chat, VoIP, and CRM to track what your customers are saying and doing and thinking, AND buying from you!
* Make the most of opportunities to take those online customers with you into your locality eg through bricks and mortar shops, which should start coming up for rent
* BUT ONLY if you can't make as much of the opportunity online as offline ie do you need local trade to grow? (eg a butcher) If not, consider bricks and mortar very carefully. A website may be the better choice for you.
* Build an exit strategy for bricks and mortar - 2-3 years or so because many of those behind the big names will be back and may well take you on. Be ready to get out before you end up like Woolies.
* Combine all your offline marketing and customer loyalty schemes tightly through your online presence
* Automate everything you can - from backend processes through to PPC reporting. For instance, do not spend precious time walking from one end of a building to another when you could put a wireless network and a Netbook at the other end (for about £2-300) and save time. (I can give 20 case studies off the top of my head right now on this sort of stuff that businesses do without thinking about the savings they could make if they just used technology!)

If you run a small to medium sized business, or are in a rural area, or are confused or worried about how you can make the most of 2009, why not post here and we'll help you out? Many minds make light work.

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Finding blogs with decent PR

I have been marketing a client's site recently by posting to blogs and forums on their behalf. Finding blogs on topic is not so difficult if you use Blogsearch from googlebut finding blogs with a reasonable PR to pass link juice on has not been easy until now.
Last week, I did a trawl around to see if there was any software that would make finding high PR blogs any easier and came across the free version of FastBlogFinder. This only allows you to see 50 blogs for any search term, so I have decided to upgrade to the Gold version. It is definitely worth trying the free version - download it today.

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SEO Lies

I'm just working my way through an ebook called SEO Lies, which cost a mere $1 and makes quite interesting reading.

Although it isn't the best written ebook around, (hery, who's complaining? It cost a dollar!) there is some valuable content which is at least written this year. Many of the internet marketing ebooks doing the rounds are seriously out of date and add to the misinformation out there for those looking to learn SEO and internet marketing techniques to create their website promotion strategy.

I appreciate the myth busting intro. It has been said for far too long that SEO is rocket science. It so isn't! Also, the fact that SEO takes forever to work needs to be dispelled, as does the myth that you need reams and reams of content for Google to notice you exist - also untrue. And you can't use duplicate content. OK, for sure, unique content is bound to help but that doesn't mean you can't put an article on your website and submit it to some of the article marketing sites too. I don't fully agree with the nofollow section, but introducing nofollow as one of the myths is useful and should provoke more research for those who don't know enough about nofollow links and process.

There is a good basic intro to SEO, explaining what you need where and why. There's a fairly clear section on keyword research, followed by how to create a search engine optimised landing page that will also catch the attention of your target market.

And the last section is dedicated to a process that the author, Justin Brooke, calls "The Boat". Basically, this is an outline of his marketing strategy and where he promotes his sites. This would make a nice template for a newbie to follow if they are short on inspiration of where to get links to their site.

All in all, well worth a dollar, so whilst it is still a dollar, why not go grab your copy of SEO Lies and see what you think.

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Small Business 'fearful' of Internet marketing

Microsoft have recently conducted a survey of small businesses Internet Marketing behaviour. It seems that the majority of the small businesses interviewed are totally ignoring Internet marketing. Not because they don't realise it is important to their marketing strategy, but mainly, it seems, because of fear.

In fact, they are so fearful of IM, that 70% of those surveyed would rather do their taxes than try to start a paid search marketing campaign. Although the majority of small businesses do set up an online presence eg a website, they don't then use internet marketing to capitalise on that presence. Interestingly though, 86% of these businesses felt they might just be missing out on opportunities and benefits that IM could bring to their business.

59% of the respondents who had a website do not use paid search eg PPC, and 90% of those had never even tried it. And yet 3/4 of them believed that their potential customers could well be searching online for their products and services.

Those who were using paid search advertising were more than satisfied - 72% reported an increase in sales enquiries, and 68% consider their paid search campaigns successful.

"Among the participants' chief concerns, most cited the common
misconceptions of cost, time and complexity as major hurdles to conducting
search marketing campaigns for their businesses. Other key insights included
the following:
-- Nearly nine in 10 (89 percent) feared keywords may become too
expensive.
-- Eighty-one percent questioned if paid search marketing is the best use
of their marketing budgets.
-- One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too
complex.
-- Twenty-one percent thought it would be too time-consuming.
-- Thirty-five percent felt they would need an agency to help set up a
search marketing campaign."

So, fear - of wasting money, time or become mired with complex systems and failing to understand how to get best value from the process - were the main reasons given for not doing search marketing.

How sad. PPC is not rocket science. It seems though that your average small business, whose marketing budget may only be £500-£2000 per year, is failing to spend even a proportion of that on what is a proven quality traffic strategy.

There is a great free guide on how to set up a successful PPC campaign which you can download here. If all you did as one of your New Year's resolutions is pick 5 keywords that sum up your business and run a trial PPC campaign, you will haver gained by doing so. And managed to break the cycle of fear that PPC is difficult, costly and time-consuming.

In fact, why not enter this PPC competition and see how you do? What have you got to lose by giving it a go? And you may find that the benefits it brings to your business are several fold. Which during an economic downturn can only be good!!

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Simpleology Blog Course

Mark Joyner has been around for years in the Internet marketing world and he is currently trying an interesting new experiment in linking strategies worth thinking about.

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

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Do we still love Google?

As the search engines become more greedy for dollars, there seems to be an inexorable rise in the number of 'products' being introduced which would seem to be trying to un-level the playing field for small businesses, home based businesses, mom and pop type enterprises etc. Not only that but adding dross to the results, and seemingly making it ever harder for searchers to actually find what they are looking for.


Google have now admitted that search results will be manipulated by staff in future. This seems to be dependent on what is the flavour of the month eg through the public opinion voiced on SearchWiki rather than any other particularly scientific criteria. Additionally, they have announced that the previously exclusiveAdsense for domains is now open to everyone, so that search results will now throw up inactive (and therefore empty) websites in order to generate revenue from the ads shown, and clicked upon.

Personally, I would have thought that cleaning all those domains which generate 404 errors, have not been updated since last century, and those that only have adverts on would have been more appropriate in attaining the raison d'etre behind Google's mantra about generating the relevant results for the most beneficial user experience.

If the results are to be manipulated by Google staff, then it would seem that it is going to get increasingly hard to get a listing by, for instance, providing quality content that is caught in organic searches. It may be that SEOs have to rely ever more on PPC to actually ensure that potential customers find their websites. This obviously financially benefits those who are providing PPC eg Google, Yahoo et al, and will surely undermine the trust in the supposed impartiality of the search engines in delivering the best results for the users.

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Clicky vs Google Analytics

Although Google Analytics is pretty good compared to many of the old school web stats tools, there are new kids on the block well worth taking a look at, especially if you want real time stats.
Clicky Web Statistics definitely offers more in the way of functionality than Google Analytics, and is of particular interest to those who are hyperactive on the Web, and want to see how actions influence vistors in real time. For bloggers, people posting to forums (for various reasons such as brand awareness raising, or to promote a particular product or during a campaign, the real time stats are awesome.

And there is huge detail about what each visitor is doing on your site, as well as new additions such as adding your Twitter followers, which seems hugely popular with all.

I am particularly taken with their Pro plans and the opportunity to get a white label version of the product at a pretty reasonable cost ie just over £20 for 20 sites per month, which for an extra £1+/month to your clients has got to be worth investigating if you are doing SEO or Web PR for a few sites. And there's an API for your devs to get their teeth into to integrate it all with other funky stuff as well.

I'm going to play more with this over the coming days on a couple of other sites and probably post some more, but if you think Google Analytics was good, then you really, really need to try Clicky!

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Quintura and visual search

I like Quintura - it generates keywords and results into a cloud that other methods fail to so I have installed an example cloud at the bottom of this blog to play with.

Just scroll down to the end of the page to see Quintura's search clouds in action.

Many SEOs have been blogging about using Quintura for keyword searches and it does seem pretty useful for that. I also like the kids version though it is heavily Americanised.

Additionally, in the visual search space, I have fallen over Kartoo, Ujiko, Grokker, and Clusty.

Well worth a play for both clients and your own internet marketing.....

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SEO Tools

I'm not normally one for buying suites of tools that claim to do all your SEO work for you, but I do spend an awful lot of time testing the freebies and trials to judge for myself whether anyone is close yet to what I would define as the ultimate toolkit.


This week's trial is for Web CEO which I have seen around for a while


First impressions are that this is a fairly impressive toolkit for those who don't have in-house tools already, and would seem to suit a small business who is looking to do internet marketing and seo but hasn't necessarily the technical expertise to develop the required software and tools.

I would never use automated submission software anyway, so that part isn't necessarily of interest to me, but I am interested in testing the validity of the potential link sites it has thrown up, as well as some of the more in-depth features this suite appears to have.

Even on first glance, the features list is pretty impressive, and once you start playing around, it seems to get better rather than worse!

This is just day 2 of playing with it for one of my clients, so I will report more later on in the trial, but it's free, so what have you got to lose? Download it and try it yourself and let's compare notes!

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Lombard Rally book - Tales of the Lombardiers

The "Lombard Rally Book - Tales of the Lombardiers" is now published and available to buy online....the ideal Christmas present for rally enthusiasts. Buy it today! Wrriten by Lindsey Annison, with a foreword by Tony Mason - Lombard Rally navigator and commentator.



145 pages, full colour photos by Andy Manston of M & H Photography, stories from many of the crews, a timeline of the introduction of Endurance Rallying by Philip Young, 2004 - 2007 Lombard Revival results.....and more! Check it out right now.

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Get a clear brief from your client

One of those days where you read a client brief and think, "What? Whaaaaaaat? And what they need is, um,......what exactly? Why would they want to do that?" So, you re-approach them for clarification and the conversation goes from bad to worse.....

But then I found this and realised my clients are not that bad.....

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At long last! A vocal forum

I've been waiting for this for years. I can see this taking off big style and it's uses for internet marketing are phenomenal! If you haven't already heard about it, go and check out Internet Shout

If you start thinking about how this could be used to promote a business, or to have testimonials from real customers, or any of the other many uses - verbal press releases for instance - you start to see how allowing people to interact verbally can have huge results. After all, this is why the telephone moved away so rapidly from its original use (dial a disc type, one way applications) to becoming the communications tool that it is today.

I absolutely love this app and am going to use it for podcasts, Web PR for my clients, sharing opinions / rants, general conversation and much more! Brilliant, good luck to Chris and everyone behind Internet Shout.

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Finding freelancers

I've been very interested in the global knowledge economy for some time, and particularly recently when the economy has been going tits up. My task has been how and where to find competent developers, coders, website designers, SEO experts and so on, from outside of the UK to extend the team. And also to ensure that whatever the economy does, there is still a consistent revenue stream into the business, even if it means working for far less than normal for a while to establish a reputation on a new site.



The reason for investigating Odesk, amongst other sites, is that it is a well-established business that gets mentioned frequently on forums and in blogs. Having looked into it, I am particularly impressed by the software which each provider and buyer uses in order to log time spent on a particular project. We use something similar here (EasyTimeTracker) to manage project time for clients, but odesk provide a far more comprehensive version, complete with screenshots and webcam images.

It takes a little getting used to, but there is a very neat test you need to take before being hired or hiring a provider which ensures you are up to speed with the most important functions of the software.

All of this follows on from using Mechanical Turk for a variety of reasons for the last couple of years.

So, whether you are looking to get a job done fast and for a reasonable rate, or just feel like filling in some spare time and earning a little extra cash, both of these sites bear investigating.

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Synonyms, Google and tildes

When you are optimising your website, and seeking good keywords to use, do not forget synonyms. Those are the related words to your keywords and phrases, and Google et al use them to suss out the overall relevance of your page for your top keywords and phrases.

How to find the synonyms? Well, you can use a thesaurus - there are online ones, or most Word Processing packages include them. Or you can get onto Google and type the keyword that you want synonyms for preceded by a tilde. That's one of these things ~ like they put over an 'n' in Spanish to make an enya.

that's one of these - ñ !

So, if for instance, you want synonyms for "cheap flights" (yes, I really do need a holiday!) you type "~cheap flights" into Google, without the speech marks. And bingo! All the synonyms that Google likes are highlighted in bold ready for you to pluck out and use on your own site.

And that's today's handy little search engine optimisation and keyword discovery tip.

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Is your software legal?

The Government has given Trading Standards the power and duty to enforce copyright laws on businesses' software, and a pilot has started in Cardiff where TS can enter business premises and check the licences of all software being used.

Whilst the majority of businesses will be unaffected by this type of law, there are bound to be some who are unknowingly or unwittingly breaking the law using downloaded copies, borrowed versions of software etc. The pilot in Cardiff may lead the way to a national scheme, so FAST have produced information to help businesses ensure that all the software they are using is correctly licensed.

Whether this is a good spend of £5million to protect software companies rights, rather than protecting consumers and businesses from dodgy software can only be debated, but at least the program is designed to prosecute only when software copyright infringement is deemed to have been done intentionally.

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Checking your newsletter links

Many businesses resort to email newsletters to keep their potential customer base informed about new products, services, news etc.

It can be a cheap and efficient method to communicate, offering special deals to subscribers, testing marketing messages and more. The newsletter can also drive trackable traffic to the website, which gives great metrics on what products are du jour, and what messages work.

However, recently, there seems to have been a slew of newsletters (and not all issued by small companies) where the links to stories of interest lead to 404s (Page not found). This can mean that the whole newsletter fails in its purpose because your average consumer does not have time, cannot be bothered, or does not know how to reformat the link so that it is correct. Or, because your site is insufficiently optimised and spidered regularly by the search engines, they cannot find any link to the product/story/etc that they are interested in when they resort to the search engines to find a link.

A broken link can be as simple as missing out the www (tell your hosting company to reconfig their servers so it isn't even required!), typing the URL incorrectly, or when using a third party forwarding software which doesn't put in the correct link (this is usually a human typing / cut and paste error though!)

A newsletter with one bad link can be overlooked, although not if that link goes to your hot must-have product, but newsletters where multiple links are wrong will mean you have just wasted the money on sending it, and will have placed indelibly into your subscribers' minds the fact that "Oh, last time, nothing in this worked, I can't be bothered to try again".

The search engine optimisation strategy employed by your company should be ongoing. Your site needs to be regularly updated, with current news, new products, blog posts etc and you need to make sure that the search engine spiders are visiting regularly. Check your traffic stats to make sure they are!

In times of economic difficulties, every penny you spend must work for you. Sending out a test newsletter and paying an employee for a few minutes time to check every link, or do it yourself, can mean the difference between achieving the results you expected from your newsletter eg sales, eyeballs on your website, long term loyalty from customers, or throwing money down the drain, and not just in the short-term.

Check your links work! Check your site works before sending the newsletter. Optimise your site properly. And test, test and test again!

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And this week's spam is....

We are obviously all under-educated in't Western world, so this last month has seen an inundation of education opportunities - buy your degree, missing out on the job you deserve, earn more when qualified etc.

Other than that, this week has seen the spam innovation (yawn) of the subject line being the surname of the sender. Unfortunately, the spammers' imaginations are on holiday and there are no more vaguely interesting names such as 'Unmerrily Thompson' or 'Doublechoc Vinszcaya' so tis all a wee bit boring this week. But, like I said, always worth reporting!

What have you had in your spam sandwich this week?

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Reminder to self

Now here's a canny idea. Your business has targets to meet, but sometimes it can be hard with so much to do to remember those targets and check progress over time.
Why not send a letter to yourself at a set point in the future to check you are still on track achieving your targets? You can now send letters to a future you for any purpose at all, but using this service to keep yourself on target has got to be a good one for keeping your goals in sight and ensuring you are doing what you set out to.

If you just want an every day reminder service though, why not use Backpack?

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Why giving is good

I have previously posted about giving away information for free. Let's go one step further and see what else you can do which will bring in enquiries, sales and profits.

A recent discussion about contacting Richard Branson about a business proposal for a community a group of us have led to talks about whether he (or Bill Gates, Dragons' Den players etc) would rip us off if we took such an idea to him/them. After all, this idea would benefit potentially thousands of people if done in a certain way, but would also yield money. What would be to stop them nicking the idea, converting it into a purely profit-making exercise, and destroying the underlying purpose?

The conclusion we came to is that although many of these players may well be in it for the money, they are also in it for a deeper reason. People attract money, are successful in business, or are canny entrepreneurs by being 'themselves' generally. And that personality is not generally 'nasty'. How many nasty successful business people can you think of?

Gates is well-known for his philanthropic activities, and Branson has become known for taking on the big boys on behalf of the consumers. Yes, it is good for profits and branding, and it buys loyalty too, but it also has a 'feelgood factor' to it. And that, potentially, for the individual able to do so, is worth more than the money generated as a side effect of doing good, or giving.

The Body Shop, run by the late Anita Roddick, built a huge amount of loyalty through its activities to protect those making the products, to reduce environmental impact etc. This was because Anita Roddick cared a great deal about doing business ethically, and giving to those individuals and communities who she felt were suffering at the hands of unethical activities by governments, large corporates etc. She felt she could make a difference to people she dealt with, and she did.

This a common thread amongst successful entrepreneurs. Giving to get.

And every business needs to look at how they can treat their customers well, go the extra mile, not try to make money from every single thing they do. To do it for the well-being of their customers. To help them overcome hurdles which might be preventing them succeeding.

For instance, Cybersavvy UK has given huge amounts of free information over the years. Not just to establish that we know what we are on about with internet marketing and small business advice, but also because we want to help people.

It is so frustrating finding people day in, day out, who just do not know where to turn to for help, who cannot justify spending consultancy fees for specialist advice, or who just don't know what they don't know.

This blog is currently the replacement for a website in rebuild that has over 600 pages of free advice on it. (It will shortly be returning to your screens so watch this space!)

The lengthy discussions about how to monetise that website have led to a decision to make 90% of the Web PR advice available for free. Why? Because at the end of the day, we want to help people 'get online to better business' - which has been our strapline for 12 years now. The side benefit is that more business is generated by helping people to get beyond the basics of SEO and Internet Marketing etc for free than by attempting to charge them for that service. Ditto in the other worlds we are involved with eg broadband and IT skills and training. We earn more by helping people to get connected, or to use their computer with some degree of competence, because then they want to be able to do more, and can see the benefits (economic and otherwise) that the free advice has brought them.

Let's pick any business and see how adopting this approach could benefit you. This approach benefits any business at all, but let's try a couple of different ones to see what we can come up with...

Let's say you are a picture framer. When a customer comes to you for a frame, what could you offer them for free?

How about advice on how to best light the picture they are going to frame? Show them examples of lights that can be used, and how placement of the light will improve the picture. Does it cost you anything? Well, maybe a few moments of your time, and you may need to get hold of a lighting company's catalogue, but that will cost pennies.

How about advice on positioning a picture in a room for best effect? Height of the picture, placement etc all make a difference to the impact a picture will have. Which pictures complement each other to create a theme in a room, or business premises? Are there other similar artists you could recommend they look out for?

Or let's say you sell carpets... Why not offer every customer a free sign that says, "Shoes off please" or a free doormat so that their carpet stays clean? Offer them practical, free advice on looking after their new carpet. Give them stain remover advice, especially natural products they may have anyway around the home so they do not need to spend big money on specialist shampoos etc.

Perhaps you teach people computer skills.....a free email newsletter once a week or month that helps them to achieve a new skill, use a new Internet tool, or provides advice about backing up their important files and documents. Why not set up a free remote back up service? Space on a server is bordering on free now, so it needn't cost you very much to provide and it is a great extra service.

Everything you do need not be about making money. Nor need there be a hidden agenda in doing things for your customers. Look at where they need help, and provide it. For free. Firstly, you will feel good about helping people, secondly, they will undoubtedly come back for more, and thirdly, there is nothing like word of mouth or word of mouse recommendations for building your business.

Give it a go today. Give a little!

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Credit crunch - collect your debts

Another in our series about how to prevent the credit crunch eating your business. This week - managing your debts
One of the biggest problems any business has is ensuring cash flow runs smoothly, and making sure that outstanding debts don't go unpaid for too long. In 1998, the government in the UK introduced legislation which gave all businesses a legal means to collect debts, and in 2002 this was amended to help businesses recover certain expenses accrued in the collection of debts as well as interest.

However, surprisingly, many businesses fail to use this legislation to ensure that debts don't remain unpaid. However, in these times of economic uncertainty, it is ever more important to ensure that the money owing to you is in your bank account and helping your cash flow management rather than in your debtors' bank account.

Firstly, including a single sentence on every invoice sent out can make it clear to your business customers that you are fully aware of the legislation and will enforce it should they fail to pay on time.

We understand and will exercise our statutory right to claim interest and compensation for debt recovery costs under the late payment legislation if we are not paid according to agreed credit terms.

The interest rate you can charge is 8% over base rate so that is at the time of writing (June 2008) 13% interest on the debt calculated from the day it is incurred.

There is clear information about how to apply the legislation, claim interest and collect debts on the Pay on Time website

Secondly, ensure that your terms and conditions are understood by your business customers before entering into a relationship with them.

Thirdly, once a debt is unpaid, you need to apply interest from the day the debt becomes due. We have had one instance where despite regularly contacting the client, frequently sending them the amended invoices showing how the debt was increasing because of interest, we still ended up taking them to Small Claims Court. By the time the debt was finally paid, the interest was more than the original debt. We did not like having to resort to Small Claims but this particular client had made every excuse in the book to try to convince us that 'any day now' the cheque would be in the post. The amount owing was fairly trivial but had we had five clients doing the same, our cashflow would have been impacted, causing us our own set of problems.

And finally, you should always know how much money is owed, by you or to you. It is surprising how many small businesses are unaware of their current level of debt or credit, nor how this affects relationships with customers and suppliers. Not only should you ensure that your customers pay you on time, but you should also adopt an 'on time' payment strategy for your suppliers.

Should you be facing economic or cash flow difficulties during this time of the so-called credit crunch, then you need to assess what actions you could take to change that situation. This can include prioritising payment of bills so you pay those with the highest interest rate first eg bank loans, credit cards etc, and make sure that any delays in paying your suppliers are agreed with them, or you will weaken the relationships with your suppliers and they may amend your payment terms to make things harder in the future for you.

So, to sum up:

* Check "What is the late payment legislation"? See the Payontime website
* Implement the late payment law on all your invoices and in your terms and conditions and contracts
* Follow up on late payments with interest and reimbursement of debt collection fees, according to that allowed by law. If the worst comes to the worst, take bad debtors to the Small Claims Court - after all, it is your money!
* Pay your own bills promptly, and prioritise bills when you are having problems to keep your own interest payments at a minimum

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Sell promotional products

If you are looking for a great way to sell products promoting your brand, company, or just to make extra income, why not check out CafePress?
One of the sprogs just started her own shop selling her clothing range featuring the deadBEAR Collection, Tony the Mushroom and other original designs. So, firstly support my kids so they can start saving for University, but once you have done that (!) why not think about what this type of activity could bring to your business too?

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And this week's spam is.....

I thought I'd keep a note of what the latest mass spam is. I can't imagine the reason but I thought it might be interesting over time!
Only ever see the subject lines so this week it is "Best of ...." and then three brand names in the fashion industry eg Burberry, Gucci, Armani, Dior, Chloe, Versace etc.

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A licence to print money?

Every which way you look at the moment, Internet marketers are building communities. And charging their members a fortune to join, whilst creating whole new product ranges and future incomes for themselves.
For years, internet marketers have been raking in the cash. Some, not all. (Some of us aren't quite so captivated by the need for cash and just love our job and helping business people get online to better business. Although being paid in flapjack this week won't necessarily prove the way to dealing with the economic crisis, but it was delicious and worth it when I earned the recipe too!)

Internet marketers, IMHO, are usually a couple of steps behind, and probably a zero or two, the porn site owners. If you want a new strategy, technique or idea for promoting your business and making money, who better to look to than the successful people doing it?

So, one of the latest trends appears to be building communities of people (read: wannabes) and using them as a resource, whilst charging them for the privilege. The porn sites have been doing this for years with Reader's Wives etc, or so I am reliably informed.

OK, OK, I can hear the shouting from the wings already - by no means do I mean everyone. I'm generalising alright? Poetic licence and all that!

I'm also not saying that those members of a community are not getting their money's worth because I believe some of the sites are offering quality content, help, advice, networking opportunities, products etc. But let's face it, much of the value is being part of an active community.

And there are plenty of those out there, have been for years, which don't charge a bean to join, and offer cracking content, help, advice etc (in some cases better than the paid versions).

But what these marketers are doing seems to follow certain fairly good ground rules for making money. And I think the ground rules are valid for any business.

I remember being told years ago, when I worked for a niche publisher, that the reason their books were so expensive (ie 10 times the price of a paperback novel....for a paperback) was that you would never get a Rolex in a cereal packet. Rolex know the value of their product and price it accordingly. So did this publisher, and by putting a high value on it, they were viewed, rightly, as a quality product.

So, ground rule 1: VALUE YOUR PRODUCT HIGHLY and price it accordingly

BUT, completely opposed to that view, these guys (the IM crew) are also offering ridiculously cheap products (as OTOs, or even freebies) that seem like real value for money. And that I suspect hits that psychological trigger in so many people, a human trait perhaps, that just LURVS a bargain. Go into any supermarket and you will see 2 for 1 offers, tempting bargains by the door or till etc. And the Tescos and Walmarts of this world know ALL the tricks, don't they?!

Ground rule 2: FREE or nearly FREE wins customers every time. They just can't help themselves.

Then there is the involvement factor. People love to be asked their opinion, view of the world or a specific topic, and to get interactive in discussions, heated arguments etc etc. And most importantly, in a world where people are increasingly isolated from their real world neighbours that need to belong, to be part of a community. many businesses fail to ask their customers to get involved, or make it very difficult.

Ground rule 3: Don't just listen to your customers. Actively involve them. Use their ideas, and get them talking to each other as well as to you.

And that last sentence contains a critical factor that I suspect most of us don't fully make the most of.

Use their ideas. The new IM communities are asking people what they want to know about, and then creating infoproducts, videos etc to meet those needs. And those new ebooks, videos etc become part of the product range - either loss leaders to bring in more paying subscribers, part of the monthly content required to keep members engaged and paying, or new pay for products. Who needs R&D teams when you get all the new ideas you want for nowt?

Ground rule 4: Talk to, listen to and plagiarise from your customers. And not just the happy ones. It may be that Mr Angry has got a valid complaint, the solution to which could be just what your company needs.

I've got more to come, but that'll do for now. Sweltering in an abnormally warm Cumbrian night and enough is enough!!

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What the font....?

What the font is a cute little website that allows you to discover what font is being used in a particular image. Useful if you see a font that you want to use for your business - logos, fliers, to create a specific image, to fit with a theme etc.

Click on the headline to go to the What the Font website....

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Market Research - A User's Perspective

For some time now, I have been looking at ways in which companies conduct market research online, and persuade people to share feedback, opinions, thoughts about their brand, products etc. In particular, surveys.

There are many companies offering to get your surveys in front of targeted potential customers and users of your products. These range from the YouGov type - high-end, occasionally political, surveys through to the very many consumer market research surveys, from the likes of LightSpeed, Nielsen, Ciao, and others.

Those searching for participants for their market research offer either cash rewards or points, which can be redeemed for prizes with participating stores. Some companies offer a combination of paid / prize surveys and loyalty shopping to their merry band of consumers.

There are several noticeable ways to fail to engage the users and therefore fail to get quality results.

Firstly, those who demand huge quantities of personal information, despite disclaimers saying that all results will be anonymous - big put off.

Secondly, those who offer a prize in return for the survey and in the small print require the user to send emails to x number of friends, and for those friends to partake in a number of similar draws etc before they qualify for the prize - enormous put off, asking far too much in return.

Thirdly, those who only offer the points, prize or cash once you qualify or complete the survey. Invariably, despite having completed a large number of fields as part of the survey and given an amount of personal or useful data to the survey owner, a screen pops up saying you don't qualify.

(There is one particular company who never seem to pay out ever, but who must have gathered incredible amounts of data before the user gets wise, according to the forums on several consumer sites such as MoneySavingExpert.com etc).

Then there are those who gather feedback on new products by sending out samples. One would assume that the drop out rate, and the difficulty in obtaining feedback from customers who were just in it for the free lunch, might prove to make this a non-profitable exercise. But from a consumer point of view tasters and freebies are always popular.

And lastly, those who take the email address of the consumer and then bombard them with messages from highly unrelated companies. Agreeing to this is of course in the Terms and Conditions but there is often no indication of how far or how widely the email address is going to be shared.

Note to consumers: always use an unimportant email address to sign up to any of this type of websites.
Note to marketers: think about the quality of the email addresses you are harvesting, or if you buy lists from this type of company.

Certain companies seem to have managed to acquire a solid reputation in this field, such as YouGov, both with consumers and those for whom they conduct surveys, whereas others must really be struggling in the face of the very negative publicity they receive from consumers.

There are additionally companies gathering user data through the installation of software, not just on PCs but also now on mobile and smart phones. These also offer a variety of reimbursement for the data gathered, which is generally anonymised but may not be. This would allow a company to hold rather too much information on your surfing or mobile habits if the consumer does not take care and understand exactly what the software is capable of.

For those who you wish to engage in market research, and in order to yield workable and usable results, it would seem necessary to offer cash, or points which can be redeemed for a wide variety of prizes from a choice of retailers or online stores.

Cash would seem to be the easiest option in some ways, and has the biggest pull for the consumer, even if only a small amount per survey such as 50p. However, you would need to only send cheques out once a certain amount has been reached eg £20 or £50, and this would require a large number of survey completions in order to do so. This may not be possible for a single company, and may require a group to join together to attain the required number of surveys eg a Chamber of Commerce, or Trade Organisation.

If you are a small business looking to run some market research, why not consider setting up a survey with SurveyMonkey? Or you could set up an Opinion Poll on your website that gathers useful market data from your site visitors.... Both of those options can be free, rather than paying a market research company to upset your potential customers with some of their unpleasant or underhand tactics (as detailed above)!!

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Investing in the youf generation

Not that long ago, no teen even had a mobile phone, and those adults who did were ridiculed for carrying around a small power generator and a technological brick. Now the age at which our children 'demand' a mobile, (as some sort of right, like clean air or pocket money) is plummeting fast.

Now, we see the internet marketing world afire with ways to personalise mobile content, market to the text generation etc, and considerable investment in ways to capture that immature market share.

However, this 'immature' market is a whole new generation with a different take on what is worth spending money on and what isn't, and I wonder just how deeply into those heads and that culture the marketers etc have gone.

Although there has always been considerable surprise expressed at how people will pay for a snippet of a song eg a ringtone where they will not necessarily be willing to pay to download music eg the whole song, it would seem that the age of information etc on the Internet being free may have spawned a generation who believe everything should be free.

Ask most teens whether they will pay to download a ringtone now, and they will look at you askance and ask,"Why pay? You can get them for free." Ditto if you replace 'ringtone' with 'music'.

No matter to them whether there is law breaking going on with copyright infractions etc, these teens are of course outside of the law usually because of their age, but also seem to be almost entirely unaware that bluetoothing to a friend a song that you downloaded last night over a torrent is illegal. To a teen, there is no visible crime, not understanding, as of course they don't, how the copyright, DRM, royalties etc world operates.

"Why is it illegal? It's just a song she wants that I have."

And with word of mouth and mouse being rife amongst that generation through their use of MSN, Skype etc, it doesn't take long for a new source of freebies to go viral amongst their peers. The playground jungle drums have always been effective in transmitting new trends but with the use of online chats etc, viral amongst that age group can be almost instant.

And the big pull is FREE. Anything free attracts tight-fisted teenagers by the bucket load. So, to me, for any business seeking to get market share in the youth market, the first thing to do is brand the product line as FREE and work out how you can capture these greedy little monsters for their lifetime, build them into loyal cutomers (never minding that for some time they are going to be unpaying customers) and run loss leaders until their credit cards start to work online and the need/desire/want turns into a capitalisable asset.

Building email lists with their addresses won't always work because many of them change email addies as frequently as they swap their SIM cards. Most of them lie like hairy eggs about their real address as this is what their parents advise them to do to prevent stalking etc. So, picking them off at Facebook, MySpace and building loyalty through Second Life and other virtual worlds, social networking sites etc may prove to be the only way forward.

And that means mastering the existing hot sites, and keeping up to date with the new ones. Without becoming predatory, or breaking netiquette.

I wish you luck! Having two of these mercenary little buggers myself, I advise my clients to come up with products for the other end of the maturity scale - the silver surfers with high disposable income!

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Get paid to blog

If you are looking at ways to make money online, and you are a prolific blog poster, it is always worth looking for ways to monetise your blog.

This is just one of those ways: PayPerPost



For a small business, there is an extra twist to this blogging malarkey.

Instead of just asking for a reciprocal link (from complementary, not competitive websites, remember?!), why not offer to post about their website, or product range on your blog? The company you are linking to can provide some of the text to make your life easier, and you could have the beginnings of a great new partnership.

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Reward your customers

Where I live, in Cumbria, this time of year sees the beginning of the influx of thousands of people attending Appleby Horse Fair - an ancient fair where horses used to be traded by gypsies from all over the UK, including Ireland. In this modern age, far more is traded than just horses, but the horses still take a major part in the week-long event.

When a horse is sold, or sheep or cows by our local farmers, there is a practice called "luck money".

The seller returns to the buyer a small amount of money as a token of a successful sale. This may be as little as a pound, but the amount of luck money can occasionally become as hard driven a bargain as the purchase price of the animal! And the amount of luck money given by each particular vendor can influence who buys from them again in the future. You are more likely to hear how tight or how generous the luck money was, than about the purchase of the horse!

We were discussing this practice last night in the pub and saying how different that is from how the supermarkets etc treat you these days. 1p or 10p short? Put something back then. Completely inflexible and indifferent to the customer, despite all the sweet talk in the adverts.

Recently, I went into a garage where there was a small change pot by the till. It is so easy to go a few pence over when filling your car, and should you find yourself short, the money in the pot is there to help you make up the difference. Anyone with a few pennies spare change can add to it, knowing that one day they may need just such a service. And it's surprising how many people in the queue in front of me put in their coppers and undoubtedly also remember that garage for this small service.

Simply by putting that change pot on the counter shows an attitude towards your customers that is also illustrated by the luck money, whereas it is countermanded by the 'greed' of those large corporates who do not want their tills to be down by even a penny, despite posting billions of pounds of profits each year.

If you have conducted a successful transaction with a customer, why not show them that you are pleased to have done business with them by showing your appreciation for their business?

Recently I purchased some boots from Ebay and when the parcel arrived, inside it was a little cloth bag with some sweets in as a thank you. Yesterday, I received an extra surprise packet of seeds in with my gardening order, which was a great touch, It was a small gesture, but those sellers will stick in my mind for that practice. Ditto the garage, and ditto the luck money idea.

However, I felt aggrieved when a large supermarket could not be flexible over a few pennies, nor did I enjoy feeling humiliated (and skint!) at the till when I needn't have been treated like that, and have never returned there to shop again. So, the reward does not need to be much in value, it really is the thought that counts.

And in building up a base of loyal customers, treating them as people and showing you are thankful for their business can really make all the difference. And it should not be in vouchers, encouraging them to spend again with you to see any return, but something for them, like a cashback, or a small bag of sweets, or a free packet of seeds.

Customer loyalty is cheap to buy if you just take one or two steps out of the ordinary, and make yourself different from those large, unfeeling corporates who care only about the money and not about the people/customers.

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Google Base competitive analysis

Want to know how your products are doing compared to your competitors on Google Base? Just give this a whirl using your top keyword terms to conduct some instant competitive analysis. Very nifty!!

Oh, and if your products are not listed in Google Base/products - ask yourself why not?!

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One Time Offers

It is always worth going round the IM sites (of which there are zillions) to see what their latest tactics are.

One word of warning: leave your credit card somewhere safe when you do. Internet Marketers really are remarkably good at sales, as well as getting you to their site in the first place, and the use of hypnotic writing means you could find yourself needing, and hence buying, products you had never heard of 5 mins earlier. It is likely that 5 minutes later, when you have dropped out of your trance, you will wonder why on earth you bought this remarkable e-book or that incredible software when you are still trying to build a working website!

One of the things you will discover when you explore IM sites is the One Off Offer or OTO. The hardcore Internet Marketing bunch started using this back in 2006, but it now seems to have become ubiquitous, and has moved into other niches.


This actually is something that most shops etc cannot achieve without very good sales staff willing to stick to their guns that this is a one off offer and won't be available another day, as they have targets to meet, and is a particularly good strategy for websites, whatever you sell. As long as you are happy to be "aggressive" with your selling technique, there is no reason not to start exploring OTOs and time-limited price discounts.

The point with an OTO is that with a little decent programming (cookies, registering IP addresses etc), you can ensure that that person is never offered the product again at that price (or has to work quite hard to get it), and so you can work on that facet of human nature which loves a bargain. With time-limited pricing, you just keep putting the price up in your sales cart, and with some well-timed autoresponder messages sent to their email address, you will probably grab them at some point if you have a good product they feel they really need or that is unique to you eg an info product.

Much research has been done with OTOs, as well as with selling 'must have' products whose price is only held for a certain amount of time. If your site visitor is already in 'buying mode' and has their credit card in hand, further offers made to them, particularly those which are OTOs or where the price is due to increase in the near future, become attractive. The buy rate for these new tempting products has been seen to be up to 150% higher than if the product is offered at other times or in a non-urgent manner.

It can be a very good way of clearing stock, of selling info products eg ebooks, or of offering training courses and unique content. Many people are also selling affiliate and third party products through this method, which can mean that you earn money without actually needing to develop your own product, deal with shipping etc.

In this day and age, with the current economic conditions, it is worth considering all this types of sales techniques to keep your sales ledger moving.

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How not to advertise your business...

Yesterday, I drove past a new business up the road. They sell vinyl etc signs for business advertising, and yet their own sign is a really poor example of what they could offer you.

Although the sign does include the business name, and the fact that they make business advertising signs, it failed to include any basic contact information eg phone number or website address to make an enquiry or look at examples of their portfolio and prices. What does this say about their business?



This business is in the middle of nowhere and is unlikely to pick up any passing trade that isn't on the way to somewhere, and therefore unlikely to take the time to drive down the very long drive to 'drop in' and enquire. More likely to make a quick note of the phone number and ring later.

I'm not having a go at this particular business, especially as I know them, but to me this is a prime example of how you can overlook even the most basic necessities of advertising your business, or worse still, give a poor example of your products and work.

To me that sign says: If they forget the contact details on their own sign, what will they forget on mine?

Another example I saw of this today was on this green energy website. Now, as far as I know, most of the world is looking at eco-friendly solutions to our ever-increasing electricity consumption, so these guys should have an eager audience.

And they had me interested until I came across this promotional cock-up. Check out the photo. Especially the after photo. Now, how long would it have taken to clear the debris out of the bottom of that cupboard, or even Photoshop it out?

In these days of belt tightening by consumers, businesses need to ensure that they stand out from the crowd, and beat their competitors. (scroll down for some other ideas about what you could be doing to beat the credit crunch). You need to show in all your promotional material, even if it is just a photo, that you are the best company to be dealing with, whatever niche you are in.

You need to show that yours are the highest quality products (ie by producing a fantastic sign to advertise your own company), and that you fully understand customer service (ie after we have installed your new smart meter, we tidy up).

How hard can it be?!

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Don't let the credit crunch eat your business

The media are busy creating a huge amount of tomorrow's chip papers around the credit crunch and economic crisis. The power of the media is such that it could actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy - like when there isn't a fuel crisis until the media tell everyone there is about to be one, so everyone goes and panic buys.

Except this time, it's not panic buying that is happening, it's panic saving. Every which way you look, people are tightening their belts. And if you run a small business, or are self-employed, you could start to feel that affecting your sales anytime now, whatever niche you are in.

For instance, the current reduction in house buying is not just affecting estate agents (150 closing each week), but it also means people are not spending as much on home furnishings, paint, kitchens etc.

However, there is no need to tighten your belt, as this could potentially have a disastrous effect. Let others tighten their belts, cut their advertising and marketing budgets, drop prices etc. Undoubtedly, the most likely thing that will happen is that certain companies go to the wall by taking this all one step too far, falling off the shopper's radar, and seeing their sales fall below the necessary levels to stay in business.

Actually, fortune favours this brave and this is one time where being brave rather than fearful about the situation could benefit your business. Especially if your competitors do not take this type of action and go bust.

What should you be doing during this time to keep your business going?

Well, there is no reason not to cut costs but there are probably many things you are NOT doing yet which you could be doing that cut costs within your business anyway. So, rather than try to cut production costs, find a cheaper supplier, drop your prices etc, why not look at some areas of your business that could be carried out more cost-effectively? And many of these are environmentally friendly too!

For instance, are you using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) to make your phone calls or are you still putting the money into the pocket of a very expensive incumbent telco for every call you make? There are plenty of companies offering VoIP systems for small businesses and home offices, or you could just use Skype and encourage your customers etc to do so too. Try adding a Skype Call us for free now button to your site and watch them change without you even asking!

Instead of driving to meetings and putting large sums of money into the Treasury and oil producers' hands, why not video conference? Obviously, there are times when a face to face meeting is essential, but video conferencing works in many situations, and also cuts down on the time you are away from your business. And it really can be done with just a £15 webcam....

Are you still using print brochures and the postal system to send information to your customers and potential customers? Use email. Produce a PDF brochure and email it to prospective clients or existing customers. Send invoices by email rather than post. Think of all the trees that this will save each year! This has the added advantage of helping you keep an up to date list of email addresses to use in other ways eg special offers, launching a new product, a regular email newsletter etc.

Look at your utility bills. The electricity and water companies are desperate for new customers so there are all sorts of deals on offer. Ditto mobile operators, banks etc. Go to Uswitch and just check you are getting the best deals for your business.

So, there are probably many savings you could make within your business just by thinking along those lines. Look at all your costs and find out whether you could be using technology more effectively, or ingeniously, to improve your profit margins.

Now, let's look at the bravery element of what you could do from a marketing angle. It is worth keeping an eye on whether any of your competitors start reducing their ad spend eg if they start dropping down the PPC listings in Google adwords or cease to feature for certain keywords. Take their customers by increasing your budget and the number of keywords you list under.

We all know that regularly updating your site can be a pain, but now is very much the time to get it done. Add as much new content as you can, particularly focussing on long tail and organic search terms, as well as targeting terms that might normally be too expensive or competitive for a small business to feature in top listings.

Take a look at your advertising. One of the things that is most infrequently done by small businesses and the self-employed is testing and measuring your ads. Any ads that are not working, or that are not proving cost-effective, stop them today. You must measure results from advertising, and this can be done by adding tracking URLs or individual website addresses for specific campaigns, codes and reference numbers, dedicated phone numbers or email addresses, etc.

Test different headlines and copy to see which works, and don't forget a call to action. Tell people what to do, and remember AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Every ad should capture the reader or viewer's attention, arouse interest, make them express desire for the product and then respond to a call to action.

Whilst we are talking about advertising, now may well be the time to approach your local TV station and ask how much advertising is. As companies begin to cut marketing budgets, the TV companies (and national press) will need to work harder to fill the many ad breaks they force upon us. And never pay the first figure they tell you - it is haggling time! It doesn't need to cost a fortune to create a TV ad, and if you can focus on the benefits of your product at this time of economic crisis and why people need it, then you could well be onto a winner.

Anyway, plenty more of this to follow over the coming days and weeks as we see how the credit crunch can be taken advantage of. Watch this space!

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Keep up! This week: C rate

Oh god. Here we go again. The Internet Marketers have coined a new phrase, and are ALL blogging, sending newsletters etc about it. This time it is "C Rate".

Now, let's make this clear, I am not going to take Mark Joyner and his cronies apart and then put them back together to sell you something. You only need read a few of the emails already doing the rounds to see that is happening.

I would quite like to take them to pieces and leave them in pieces, with you still holding your pounds or dollars in your hands.

I am no longer on the side of the internet marketers, although by being on their drop lists etc I can at least spot useful trends that can be employed by your average website owner ie you.

This latest is, I promise, nothing new, and it certainly isn't worth paying out for. Now, the VSA (Virtual Sales Agent - customer service tool) see previous post, I forked out hard cash to try it, as it seems to be to be a worthwhile module for any Linux/Php based site. (But you will need to wait, as I am still trying to suss Joomla through the newly bought videos. When I have won.....watch this space.) I think that VSA and the Joomla/Moodle stuff might be worth investing in, but this latest viral charge isn't.

The problem for me is that I follow one particularly successful money-making world _ IM. If I followed the developments online of the porn industry, I could be anywhere up to 5 years ahead of the online activities of my competitors in other industries, even if I was selling dog leads. Actually, that could be misconstrued as a porn item, let's try "Queueing systems" instead.

But I follow the IM guys, and see what is going to be big in 1-5 years time on the Net. And some of the stuff they trial is interesting, and some is crap (as they openly admit themselves), and some is just a license to print money from mugs.

Going back to the point of this post, if you think viral marketing is the biz then work out how it works. It takes:
1) a community
2) a buzz
3) timeliness

Just search on "C rate" on Google and discover whether the folks promoting it are all 'inter-related'. Type some of the names in, bearing in mind most of these guys have 100s of websites. It can take quite some time to put together the family tree but you only need to look for a few of the well-known names to see how they inter-promote each other to make things work.

Thing is, you can do that too.

In Bolivia, I learnt more about co-operatives and co-operation than I ever did looking into Mondragon, or the Rochdale folk. And I know quite a lot about that stuff...

So, today's lesson is: find others, doing the things you want to eg promote your businesses in a niche or locality, and work together. It will never, or very rarely, hurt.

I spent this evening trying to sell something on Ebay. I'm an Internet Marketer, trying to sell a personal item but looking to check out some skills using new techs.

I didn't need any of them. I needed some really old skills to make contacts, become a human, find the forums/community where people treat you as a person and say, "Hell, if that is why you selling it, I'm interested."

You honestly don't need a C rate or anything similar from the Mark Joyners, Kevin Wilkes etc of this world. You need to be you, belong to a community (or 3 or 100), and deliver good, sound honest products.

Not promises. Empty or otherwise.

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Automated reminders

Sandy is a hugely useful tool that sends reminders to you of everything you need to do. In the morning, you get a heads up of all that you should be doing today, and as you send in simple textual notes to yourself that Sandy then feeds back to you in time to remember that important meeting, to take the supper out, what someone is called etc.

It's quite similar to backpack, which I've also used to try and make it easier to deal with all the many things there in a day to remember.

The next thing to focus on is to rid the days of quite so many things for the brain to cope with. I am now researching Get Organized Now and Get Things Done, both of whom offer a system, folders, stickers etc to make dealing with projects, clients, and even household chores more efficient.

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Customer Service...people powered

GET SATISFACTION.com
One of the things the Internet has become full of is customer service complaints. There are so many dissatisifed customers out there it seems, and not just for the big companies, but also the small ones. Tracking these complaints online can be a full time job, which is why I mentioned filtrbox

But how can you provide excellent, transparent customer service when you have limited resources? Well, today's great discovery is getsatisfaction.com

It is an online forum type application where people can post messages, ideas, feedback, ask questions, etc to your company. Basically, it allows you to support your customers, as well as allowing them to support each other. Which reduces the amount of support you need to provide when your loyal customer base are helping each other out.

It is free and well worth joining up to check it out. If you can support a few of your customers through an application such as this, then you will inevitably increase the chances of them buying from you again, recommending you to others, and probably checking back occasionally to see if they can help anyone else out in return.

The site is easy to use, very Web 2.0 in appearance and structure, and has been clearly thought out. The fact that it is being used by some large companies, probably as a trial, as well as some of the busy sites such as Twitter, implies that it may well have legs.

Give it a go - get satisfaction!

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Tracking information you need to know

I have discovered Filtrbox I'm not sure why this application has taken so long to be developed as it really is quite an obvious one for those who suffer from information overload, but now it has been, I have to say it is very good.

As an Internet marketer, with many other interests, keeping abreast of all the latest goings on for clients, my business, as well as all the techie and non-techie interests, has become increasingly difficult. Google alerts, technorati, and all the many email newsletters that need to be read mean that some (errr...many!) often get overlooked.

Just tracking industry happenings, mentions of a product name, event news, a possible link etc etc for a single client can mean setting up a huge number of Google alerts or similar for those keywords. Just opening and reading all those alerts and seeing whether they are relevant to a client is time-consuming, and doesn't necessarily offer an obvious payback, unless you are well-informed about the client's niche, and can spot trends, important information etc.

For a small business, the time that this can take up is often unavailable because just dealing with email enquiries, orders etc eats into the little time available to a small or micro SME. Hence farming it out to your friendly (and increasingly time-strapped Internet marketer!)

It is however, hugely important to keep an eye on what is happening in your field, what is being said about your company etc: with the competition, whether anyone is bad mouthing your company, posting bad reviews, undercutting your prices, or even raving about how wonderful you are.

In the old days, you would pay a press cutting service or similar to monitor magazines, the newspapers, journals, events for any information about you or your competition. With the growth of the Internet, there are far more places to scan for information of relevance to you, for instance stocks and shares, investment opportunities, and it really is a full-time job to keep abreast of it all.

This is where filtrbox comes in. It automatically scans news sites, RSS feeds, and forums for your keywords and phrases, removes duplicates, and makes it very easy to scan through the results to see if there is anything of interest.

For any company, large or small, this is an incredibly useful tool, condensing the many sources of information into one place. For those of us with far too many outside interests, you can group information sources together so that you can easily check one particular topic or niche without needing to wade through the results for something entirely unrelated.

It is currently in beta, but if you want to give it a try, it is most definitely worth a shot so click here.

I'd put my money on this going a long way and becoming very popular.....these aggregation Web 2.0 tools that make life easier are always going to be winners!

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Customer Service

After writing the last post, thought I should write about today.

Was busy, lost in Google Analytics for a client, trying to work out how on earth Google could be so far wrong with the number of visitors they are recording on two separate sites against the other traffic stats. (If Google was right, nearly every single visitor bought a product, which is so blatantly not true) when....

Knock at the door.

Open door to find a lady on the doorstep, with a dog.

"Can you fix computers?"

Said the lady, obviously.

Methinks: here we go again. "Um, yes". (Wonder who has grassed me up now).

"Mine has stopped working. I can't get on the Internet."

I was having a bad day and if I were a doctor, a casual observer would no doubt have said that my doorstep/bedside manner left a lot to be desired. And I've lost a veneer off my front tooth and currently don't actually want to open my mouth in public either.

But, this is a small village and what goes around comes around so fire brain up into diagnostics mode and suggest the basics, through a semi-closed mouth - turn it all off at the plugs, make a coffee, try turning it back on again.

"I've been trying that since Sunday."

Hmmm. I know BT have been pratting about up the village - work ongoing for over a year now since the big storm - and also there is an email doing the ISP rounds about major BT infrastructure work due this week. "Sunday, you say. Who are you with?" "Pipex. Could you come and look?"

"Yep. But, um, not now."

I'm in the middle of "Mum, where are you?" texts as I'd ignored daughter 2's pleas to drive 5 miles to collect her from school to buy the ingredients for Thai green curry. After all, I was WORKING and determined to crack this Google analytics problem for a PAYING client - the one who will be paying for next month's ingredients. (For food which somehow won't even make it home, and will never be cooked here either, ever).

Sprog 2 is now sitting outside the Co-op in the rain.

Then I face the really awful question. "I recognise the dog, but errr, where exactly do you live?" Followed immediately by the pacifier, "I can be there at 7ish, I just have to go and buy ingredients for my daughter's cookery at the Co-op first". (And pick her up....).

How can you recognise someone's dog and be absolutely clueless about where in this tiny village they live? Had either twin been available (other one is grounded after dyeing the almost finished, after 5 years, newly decorated bathroom - floor, bath, sink and surfaces - bright and indelibly pink last night in a failed attempt to dye her black hair), they could have told me instantly.

Not that I would necessarily have listened as I am still incandescent about the stupidity of the hair dye incident. In fact, I am almost the same "seething" colour as the bathroom, really.

So, bought the ingredients, rescued daughter, (not in that order), failed abysmally to correctly read the ingredients on some new form of hurried supper - panini from the Co-op - and nearly blew the microwave up. "Remove from plastic packaging and remove the sauce sachet" should have been in MUCH bigger writing. Put supper in oven for rest of family, and walked casually up the street to what felt like a far-flung outpost of the village, and arrived wheezing on the doorstep.

Within 2 minutes of sitting down, I was cursing all ISPs for their abject failure to support their customers, and British pharmawotsits for not letting us just buy an inhaler over the counter like every other country I have ever been to.

And also that my wifi doesn't work through the trees around this house so I can just get online and find the answers for what suddenly appears to be an ISDN line, not ADSL. (Jeez, that's what they did with ISDN? Stuck it into rural homes and called it broadband?? I must check.)

Speak to her husband on the phone, who also cannot remember where they might have put the paperwork for a connection they had every right to assume would not just go pear-shaped overnight, and silently curse Pipex and most ISPs (except SWBB) a little more.

Am as honest as it is feasible to be in between wishing I'd remembered to get a box of Ventolin inhalers in Bolivia, and say, call me on this number if the customer service department can't help.

When offered anything financial for walking up the village, I obviously refused. After all, I hadn't solved the problem and it was a lovely evening, and exercising legs and lungs (occasionally at least) appears to be something I ought to be doing daily.

Some 2 hours later, am totally unsurprised to get a phone call asking for further assistance.

I'm not being rude but this lady is from a generation where you maybe feel embarrassed to ask for help from a company / supplier of product as it feels like you could be asking too much from them.

(Say this to me in 20+ years time and I'll abandon my pacifist principles, hit you, and then spend the evening boring you shedless with examples of CRM and customer service working, until you come round!)

Actually I don't even know that it is a generation gap thing. I think many of us are so totally fed up with being put on hold, trying to communicate with customer service reps who don't even speak our language, being treated like idiots etc that we seek, and pay for, local help. Hence my post the other day about this virtual sales agent....(scroll down!)

So, I've looked up all the Pipex info, written it down, and am wandering up there again tomorrow. With my tooth covered in Tippex and a better bedside manner. And, depending on how long it takes me (and the fact I probably have an entire new bathroom suite and floor to buy), and with a quick prayer to the god of computing and Internet, I think I'll charge half for me, and ask her to give something to the Primary School. And I'll go in the car instead of walking, until I can renew my Ventolin 'script. However environmentally friendly that might not be.

And when I get home, I'll spend the evening writing complaints letters to Pipex, ThinkBroadband, and Sunpat about customer service.

The last because it is bloody time they redesigned their jars so us consumers can actually reach the last bits of peanut butter from those stupid ridges at both the top and bottom of the jar when we get home and need summat to eat. Or at least give us some vouchers to buy the special knife you must need to get into those nooks and crannies. Because that Sunpat jar is a prime example of 21st century poor customer service.

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E-commerce or Ebay?

I was stopped in the street the other day. Usual thing...."Is it true you know about computers?"

Now, normally, I try to find a way to answer "No" as I can't fix many technical problems with computers and can't be bothered with, "My motherboard seems to have blown" or "The hard drive has just re-formatted itself, please can you rescue all my files?".

Let's be truthful...I'm an Internet marketer, not some sort of hardware geek (honest!). I have an exceptional contact list that has taken years to build up to solve problems I can't deal with. (Doh, I'm female, not stupid! I also ask directions when I'm lost.....).



But, back to the point: it's someone I know and respect and, if the next question was beyond me, then at least I know I know someone (probably locally) to help. So, I said, "Yes".

The next question put it much more into my realm...."Do you know about websites?". Bring it on, much more my sort of thang!

"I've got all my numbers....." (Hmmm?) "...and I need a website built to sell my products, can you help me?" Thought we'd better clarify the numbers thing, thinking I'd fallen back into some sort of pre ICANN timewarp to when Compuserve existed etc and everything ran on IP addresses only.

Managed to abate the panic enough to finally work out he meant his ftp details. "Ah, those numbers! Yep, that's fine".

God, I was so relieved. I hated trying to remember IP addresses in the old days - humans are only made to remember a certain number of telephone numbers, not IPs as well! I have a friend who seems to remember the IP address of every server and website he has ever worked on, as well as the BBC and other sites - just in case the DNS goes down, I guess, but...hell, how sad is that?! (But, then that's why he is in my address book - just in case that day ever comes!)

And this is why, of course, mobile phone address books are so important to us and we all panic if we lose our phone. None of us can remember all the numbers our friends and family now have. You hear wails of "But I don't know how to reach my boyfriend/husband/mum/kids...." etc at the site of a mobile phone loss or theft.

I guess that's another post about backing up, and WRITING things down!! (Oh yes, and then there's that fantabulous money making idea for a directory enquiry service that doesn't belong to BT et al with all our numbers in it so we can be found.....!)

But I digress (as Tom Lehrer said so infamously).

Back to this acquaintance of mine who was looking for a website.....I knew from the moment he pulled up, this is never going to be a site build that will make me rich as I wouldn't ever want to charge him more than a couple of hundred quid at the mostest, but you think on your feet when you are faced with 'on the street' pitches!

That'll be the third cheapo website in a week I have been asked for, so if you are a website designer who can churn these things out, get in touch - nowt fancy required).

"Do you have an Ebay store?" "No, can you do that for me too?"

Now, instantly, what I see, as someone who has right gone off work during my period of enforced retirement, is an easy way out. Build ebay store, spend half a day on it, teach [unnamed person] to use it and add items etc, charge a coupla quid (probably in Guinness), walk away.

"Yep", she says, ready to return to walking down the street.

"Well, I want one of those as well as a website".

"Oh...OK. What are you selling?"

Now, because I am determined that this blog and its contents will be transferred to the new Web PR site and win all sorts of organic search challenges, I am going to add these keywords. Not just to enhance the value of this story, you understand, which I think it does anyway!

"Sheep shearers".

Now, I saw the Thorn Birds, way back when with Richard Chamberlain, Rachel Ward, and Brian Brown (who everyone swears blind wasn't the guy who spoke backwards in that kids programme with the talking aspidistra - The Adventure Game, wasn't it?!).

Sheep shearers? Australian ones? In Cumbria? In Eden? Definitely bring them on!!! I'll build the site!!!

"I'll come round with some ideas in the next few days," he added, and drove off into the night.

Now, I spend my life looking at keywords - synonyms, antonyms, phrases, potential keywords, you name it. He'd gone about 10yds before my boringly Thesaurus-trained mind came up with sheep clippers. As in: the item you use to clip sheep. Not a full-blooded sweaty Australian or New Zealand male shearer, but an electric clipping machine. Or even, which potentially it could be knowing this guy, an antique, hand-powered, or even an environmentally-friendly bicicyle-powered clipping thingamijig.

I nearly called him back and said unless he could guarantee that he was bringing some new, good to look at blokes around here, who were likely to drink in our local, I wasn't doing it. And then some part of me thought, "No, you owe him anyway, build him the Ebay site and a 3 page site with a content management tool on it, and just be glad of the work."

But, when he comes round about this website, I am going to suggest that there may be some mileage in this "bringing over guys to shear sheep in UK" suggestion, and if he would pay, I am willing to go to Oz and NZ and look into it as a business proposition for him. Cos, after all, the Down underers are busy nicking all our best skilled people and farming in this country is suffering (as are rural females), so why not?!

[Note to partner: this is a blog post! It is keyword rich and tongue in cheek! But, PHWOAAA!]

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Capturing lost sales

I was having a discussion just today about setting up goals for Google analytics to see what number of drop outs are occurring during their sales process. The client said that if they could average 3 sales a day throughout the eyar, that would be fantastic, but if they could increase it to 4..... Some days they see 7 sales a day of their niche product, but obviously there are other days with very few sales.

We talked about having Live chat or help agents to try and capture anyone 'dithering' over a sale who needed an instant answer to any questions they might have, which could help them to purchase.


One of the problems small businesses face is not having enough manpower to monitor issues such as this, let alone cater for the CRM side of the online business.

Then, oddly, one of those dreaded mass emails from another internet marketer dropped in. (They are always selling a "friend's" product, or promoting a colleague's attempt at becoming an Amazon Best Seller -today only! I tend to read through the middle of them to see what the latest sales technique is between internet marketers as that is who they generally have on their lists!

Today, it caught my eye because it happened to be for a virtual sales agent. And, most importantly, it was not a product/service that was particularly costly, or being pushed on a pay per sale, or lifetime cost, but a one off fee of $97. Which is about £50 even on a good day so it's not hugely expensive.

I read the blurb, pages and pages of it, which is now the general mechanism for selling internet marketing tools, and looked beyond the calls to action, and emotional triggers. Mainly because having read something similar the other day which seemed like a bit of a 'no brainer', the catch was the need to have a hosting account with a different company. At extra cost, obviously.

The small print here appears to be what your host is running on their server in the way of PHP and Unix/Linux. So, if you are on a Windows box, you can't use this software, but that's a minor issue if the sales agent works to 1) capture sales you were potentially going to lose 2) build an opt-in list of interested parties for follow ups and 3) get an email newsletter tool thrown in.

Anyway, before it goes up in price, I'm going to buy one and stick it on our Linux server and have a play with it. Because it seems to me that it is all very well having an e-commerce shop open 24/7, but if your customers leave without getting their questions answered, and without a personal approach by one of your sales staff (even if they are an avatar), you may not just be adding that extra touch that could bring back the money you are potentially losing. And it's got a lifetime money back guarantee on it, so what is there to lose in trying it?

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Don't fall for the hype

I've just written an article about Web 2.0 tools for a client. I didn't really want to say, "Don't fall for the hype" at the start of it as some of their services include full-on Web 2.0 social networking and marketing, but right now, I feel like banging it into everyone's heads.

Don't fall for the hype.

12 years on, and many of the sites I look at still don't know the basics of PR and marketing, let alone online or Web PR / marketing. That's no bad thing, as it means that you can always improve on what you are doing to tell people about your products, brands and services, and hence achieve more sales. But it does mean that there is no point getting over-enthusiastic about the latest toy on the playground if you haven't yet mastered the basics of walking and talking.

The last post was about the IM gurus getting together and trying to flog Mark Joyner's latest product, which to me looks suspiciously like the Emperor's New Clothes scenario. Having flipped through that site, and refused point blank to part with any money, I am horrified at the hype. And how many people will fall for it, and part with good money for no seemingly good reason. (Hey Mark, feel free to correct me!)

(Go and look for yourself if you need to. This is not about becoming a best selling author as such, it's about solving America's obesity and health problems as far as I can see. You could also begin to think that the IM guys have taken psychological and emotional selling to a whole new level - possibly even bullying people into decisions they could potentially regret, however cheap they may seem?).

Back to the purpose of this blog, Web PR. Luckily, most of the Web 2.0 stuff is open source widgets etc, which don't need to cost you any money to incorporate into your marketing strategy, but there are also many other new toys that could cost you money and time you may not have.

Think about Christmas and kids. How many times have you watched a child open a present you spent hours searching and queuing for, only to see them chuck it to one side, and get more fun out of the cardboard packaging it came in? Lots of Web 2.0 stuff is at that level. And I don't mean the cardboard box. I mean the discarded toy.

Whichever strategy you decide to employ, make sure it works. Or software you decide to buy which may solve a problem you have - make sure it does solve that problem. And that it doesn't create a new problem. Like a cash flow crisis. More work than you can handle eg twittering to some non-existent community, blogging to your staff, creating videos for your secretary's friends, answering emails in relation to some offtopic post made casually on a forum, answering poor product reviews on websites because you made a cock-up of some Ebay sale etc.

And don't fall for the hype. Just because 20 Internet Marketers tell you something is great, is it? What do they do for a living? Yep, market products. And the porn industry and the IM guys are leagues ahead of others in selling the emperor's (or empress') new clothes.

Build customer loyalty by selling something worthwhile. Treat your customers as rational, thinking human beings. With respect. And build a community by offering something of value. It may only be a very small community, but it could well prove to be all you need to make a good and honourable living.

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Treat your customers' email addresses with respect

Today, I was forwarded an email that included all of the recipients' email addresses in the To field. This is such a big no-no in these days of spam that I thought I would blog about it to make sure, once again, that this practice ceases and to show WHY this should never be done by you.

The fact that this particular email came from a Government department should come as no surprise considering how lax the UK Govt has been with confidential data recently, and what we have all learnt about their lack of processes to protect data of any description. Worse still, this came from someone senior who advises Govt on Internet and Online Policy, and included email addresses which would be pretty hard to track down if you wanted to contact these people, so they are obviously not meant to be out in the "wild".

However dim this senior Advisor has been on a Friday afternoon, not sharing email addresses is basic netiquette, and should be one of the first things drummed in to any email user's head - whatever their position in life or reason to be emailing.

Open a new email message right now and look at the options you have for including people's email addresses. You should see:
To
CC
BCC

To is obvious. That is who your email is going to, and the recipient's email address will be shown in the 'headers'. There has to be an email address here or the email cannot be sent.
CC stands for 'carbon copy' and means that all recipients can see who else has received the email. Generally, but not always, email packages will only show the name rather than the email address.
BCC stands for Blind Carbon Copy and means that none of the recipients can see any of the other recipients details.

Now, imagine you are sending out an email to all of your customers. Which of the three choices would you use?

Do you want all of your customers knowing the contact details for every other customer? Would you want one of your competitors to get hold of the contact details for each of your customers? How would your customers feel if they saw their address listed openly like that?

The answer to all three of those questions should be a resounding No. I hope! So, it has to be the BCC field. In the To field, you would put your own email address as you don't mind every customer seeing that twice.

What you are doing by using the BCC field is not just protecting the identiy of your customers from unscrupulous use by ANYONE who got hold of a copy of that email. Nor just protecting your customers' identities from a competitor. You are also showing that the information your customers have given you, eg their email address in this instance, is being treated with respect, and not revealed to any third party, intentionally or otherwise.

Even if you are forwarding a message that has everyone's email addresses in, you should remove them before you hit forward. These awful chain letters which go round the Net are prime sources of email addresses for spammers, and once your email address is out there, who knows which databases you will end up on, nor how much drivel will end up in your inbox as a result.

So, when you are sending an email to more than one or two close friends or colleagues, ALWAYS USE THE BCC FIELD.

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Podcasts and Transcripts for IM

Having mentioned transcription, it seems worthwhile extolling the virtues of using podcasts and transcripts on your website, and elsewhere, as part of your marketing toolbox.

What is a podcast?

A podcast is basically just an audio file. Think of listening to a radio show or interview - that is a podcast. Interestingly, the Internet has opened up the way for the BBC and other radio stations to make available 'recordings' or podcasts of all their shows, so the radio is no longer just real time. If you miss something you can listen again, by downloading the podcast to your ipod, MP3 player or computer.

For a business, a podcast can be a very useful tool indeed. And particularly because it fits into that category of items that you only need to create once and they become part of your marketing inventory or collateral. This is called 'long tail' marketing and means that a visitor to your website can listen to your podcasts whether your shop is open or shut, they can access it over and over again, and it costs you nothing more than the initial cost of creation. Which could be pretty much free if you use the many tools out there for creating and editing podcasts, such as Audacity. You can even record something on your mobile phone and make that available.

Podcasts can be about ANYTHING at all. That's the beauty of them. They can be short, or long. You can add music or jingles. They can be interviews, answers to common questions, descriptions of how to install or use a specific product, testimonials from satisfied customers, a sales pitch for a particular item - ANYTHING.

It could be interviews from people within your community or staff. The sound a machine or car should make when tuned up using your services. The silence outside your remote home office. A walk through of how to make an omelette. A description of how a new product has been developed, including interviews with those involved in the process. It could be ANYTHING!

The point of using podcasts though on your site is to get across a message to your potential customers that achieves a core objective, be that raising brand awareness, making a sale, answering a query, or CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

And once you have created a podcast for your site, don't forget to make it accessible. That is, for those with hearing difficulties, offer a transcript so they can read the information that is given in the podcast.

Transcription is cheap and easy if you use Mechanical Turk (as recommended in the last post), or software such as Express Scribe.....which you can downlaod and use for free, but some of their stuff requires a paid licence. See more here....6 Ways to Dictate. See our range of dictation software for PC, Mac & Pocket PCs. >>Download Today to save 10-50% off normal pricing.

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Mechanical Turks

I love being a Mechanical Turk! And I like the idea and ethos behind it, especially as a Web PR person whose clients generally have limited budgets. Also, the number of times a software app has failed to work successfully because it is only artifical intelligence and lacks 'people power' does seem to have been marginally solved with this approach. But what is a Mechanical Turk and what do we do?



MTurk is an Amazon company. It is basically a system which gets people to do the jobs that computers are unable to do. This can be something as simple as writing a review of a product, finding links for items that fit certain criteria, adding tags to Amazon books, or, my favourite, transcribing podcasts and interviews. There is a whole other side to it which involves web services, APIs, coders, etc but that doesn't really fit in a Web PR blog!

The pay is pitiful, but that works well for those looking to get jobs done. However, as a Turk, the money in your account mounts up fairly quickly if you get bonuses, and you get to spend it on Amazon.com. (This isn't great for a UK Turk as it means no DVDs or electrical stuff, only books but hey...it's money).

However, for a company with a limited budget looking to achieve some results with online marketing but without necessarily the in-house resources (time, people etc) to carry out these tasks, Mechanical Turks are your solution.

Imagine you need to find blogs which are for your target audience eg interested in your products, services, industry sector etc. Don't spend several hours on Google looking for them, pay a MechTurk to find them for you, and review them. Do they have regular postings? How many subscribers? Do they accept comments? Would the blog owner be open for a product review of your product, a prize for a competition, and advert? The list is endless and the cost for a job like that would probably come in the 10-25cents region.

Interviewed a knowledgeable member of staff, a well-known guru in your industry - get a full transcript of it for a couple of dollars. None of the commercial services can do it this cheap, and there are over 20,000 Mechanical Turks up for that particular task.

Want content for your website? Set down some criteria and get it written for you for a few pennies. Want someone to review what your competitors are up to, all the keywords on their websites, what their rankings are in the search engines, etc etc etc? Hire a Turk!

It really is a cheap and efficient way to get jobs done, and the turnover of jobs (or HITs - Human Intelligence Tasks) on MTurk seems to imply that there are a considerable number of us whiling away our free time doing the HITs offered.

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Keyword Brainstorming

Five Easy steps to creating a keyword list.

You know you need keywords in your website, both for the search engines to index, and also for your users so they see the words they are looking for that convince them they have landed in the right place for their needs.

Your keyword list should be in place BEFORE you design your website.

Why?


Because those keywords, and where they are included in your site, can affect how your site is built.

However, it is likely that you already have a website, and that you had no keyword list available when it was built. Or if you did, perhaps your keyword list needs updating and hence your site needs to include the new keywords and phrases.

So, how do you find your keywords?

Here is a step by step process to a keyword brainstorm. Whether you have a website or are in the process of designing, or redesigning, you need a keyword list.

You don't need to do these in order, you just need to do each step to create a comprehensive list.

Step 1: Out of your own head
Get a nice, clean piece of paper, a pen, (or create a spreadsheet), make a coffee/tea/hot chocolate, and sit somewhere quiet. (Turn off the radio, TV, phone, kids etc!). Now, think about your business and start writing. You want every word and phrase you can possibly think of that anyone wishing to find you might consider to search on.

Name of business, location/address, products it sells, who it sells to, product codes or brands (if global or well known eg iPod shuffle, Nokia, N95, etc). Uses of your products eg in the health service, for education, bed & breakfast toiletries, listen to music - whatever uses your products have, think of them and write them down.

What questions might people ask about your products or services? "Who promotes websites?" for instance. Or, "What is the battery life of an Ipod?" "How does no win, no fee work?" "How do I stop my home being repossessed?" etc etc etc.

Think of any organisations or trade bodies you are a member of, and write them down. This can include Breakfast Clubs like BNI, or online networking sites (from Ecademy to facebook) - everyone with whom you may be associated.

Do your products involve a particular technology? Write down all the words you can think of to do with that.

Is there specific jargon for your industry? Write down as many terms as you can think of.

Are there any common mispellings associated with your products and services? eg acomodation. Write down any you can think of.

Log on to your website, and work through it carefully reading every word. It is amazing how many keywords you will find on your existing website that you may have overlooked. And don't forget to do "View, Source" in your browser. That will let you look at the lines of code behind your website.

At the top of each page you should find META DATA. That is code that a good website designer will include in your site to help the search engines rank your site. It looks like this:

Due to blogger restrictions, I have replaced < or > with ..
..title..Keyword brainstorm for perfect search engine optimisation../title..

..meta name="description" content="How to choose the right keywords and phrases for your website optimization" /..

..Meta name="keywords" content="keywords, phrases, search engine optimisation, search engines, optimization, article, help, find, brainstorm, website, ranking, rank, SERP, search postion, meta data, meta tag, keyword, content, description etc etc etc"..

Nick the keywords out of there too. (We'll show you how to make sure that each page of your website is optimised so that these keywords in your meta data have the right weighting in your visible text another day!)

You should also find keywords behind your images, in what are known as the ALT IMG text, or longdesc (long description) text. Look for ..alt img=".....".. in the source code of the pages, or hover over an image and see what the little box says. (N.B. This will only work in Firefox if the site designer has included a ..title.. in the alt img text, so if you don't see a box when you mouse over an image, you will need to scroll through the source code of the page. If this is too complex, don't worry too much. Most people completely forget alt img text when building or optimising a site - more fool them!

Ok, how we doing? Got a full page of A4 yet? You should have.

Step 2: Friends & Family, Colleagues & Customers
Use the resources around you for free ideas. Ask all of the above to offer keywords about your business. Invariably they will come up with all sorts that you may have missed. Your customers are quite important in this process, as they will give you a good idea of what terms other potential customers may consider when trying to find you and your products.

You can ask your customers quite easily, without it seeming like you have suddenly lost all your marbles! If they phone asking for a catalogue, or to place an order, ask them at the end of the call what words or phrases they associate with you and your business.

And don't forget to ask them how they found your website either whilst you have the opportunity!

Step 3: Competitive Analysis

Next, we are going to look at which keywords and phrases your competitors use. After all, they are in the same market as you so inevitably will have used many of the keywords you need to include in your brainstorm.

If you have no idea who your competitors are, tut tut! If you do, then log onto their websites, and scan their sites for words of use to you. Check their meta tags as well.

Then, Google a few of the phrases you think your potential customers are most likely to use, and investigate the websites that those terms bring up.

Inevitably, you may find that other industries also use the same terms for different purposes, in which case make a note to yourself that this is the case. If you can make a strategic partnership with the top sites in the other sector, you can divert any traffic who has, because of the duplicate meanings of the terms, accidentally landed on their site back to you.

Right, now you have nicked all your competitors' keywords, and found many from friends, your own head, customers etc, let's see whether other people globally use them.

Step 4: Use keyword tools online
Now you have a fairly reasonable list of words, let's try a few online tools to see what else you can discover.

First up is WORDTRACKER.
This is without a doubt, looking at its Alexa ranking, one of _the_ top keyword sites on the Net now. We have used it since it was launched. Try the free trial, and then make the most of its cost-effective subscription based model because the more words you can lay your hands on that are highly used, the better for you, your site and the visitors you are trying to attract.

Using Wordtracker is easy, and there are plenty of instructions on the site to learn how to use it in a matter of moments.

Don't forget when using Wordtracker to note how many searches, or the popularity, of each term. This is useful info to get visitors.

Google Adwords offers another tool for finding keywords. Sign up for a free account, then under Tools, you will find the Keyword Tool. This will give you plenty of ideas about top searched keywords you can include in your text, metas, etc.

Overture (once upon a time called Goto and now owned by Yahoo) also offers a free keyword tool.

There are more free keyword tools. You can search for them if you choose to keep extending your list....

Ok, how we doing? A few pages now one hopes, of those all important keywords and phrases.

And finally, Step 5: your website traffic stats

You should have traffic stats for your website. These show how people have found your site (search engines, links etc), where they come from, how long they stay, which pages they visited, and may tell you far more depending on which package you are using. It could be sitemeter, Webtrends, Webanalyzer, or one of many others. This is the most important information you have about your website.

You need to access your stats and find keywords by looking for 'referrals'. It may be hidden under another heading like 'search engine keywords'. What you are looking for is information about which keywords your visitors typed into the search engines which led them to visit your website.

It will surprise you no doubt to find that some terms have actually led to your site. If you run a Bed & breakfast and discover that for some bizarre reason "womble porn" leads to your site, then brighten up your day by writing down the most obscure ones and pinning them to your office wall! And once you have done that, write down all the keywords and phrases which have led people to your site over the last week, month or year, depending on how much data you have on this.

We could suggest 10 or more other places to look for keywords (The thesaurus on [Open] Office Word, blogs, forums, etc etc), but that's enough for starters.

So, you are done!

And I bet your coffee/tea/hot chocolate is cold, or possibly even days old, so make a new one and then ponder the words on that list.

How many of them are quite surprising? Expected? Lead to places you hadn't expected when you googled them? Unthought of by you previously? Definitely (not) included in your website? Highly competitive? Bring in lots of (unexpected) traffic?

This exercise on its own should open your eyes to popular keywords, what your competitors are doing, terms you may not have considered for your niche, or terms that mean something else entirely when you look on the Net. Sometimes, you may be using what you feel is a barely used, industry specific term and find it leads to sites in a different sector with large budgets who you have no chance of competing against.

We have a client who discovered a term they thought was very specific to their sector was actually up against the adult entertainment industry - the experts of search engine optimisation and capturing traffic. And that this had led to the client experiencing high traffic and visitor numbers on their website but very few sales. It didn't take long to rebrand the product and change the keywords associated with it and pull in a qualified audience who were actually interested in the client's products and not fetishes!

Anyway, now you have your keywords, the next step is to prioritise them into the order of importance for your potential visitors and then ensure that they are included in your website.

Tomorrow is another day. And it would be good if for now you just let that keyword list you have created have a time to mature. And for you to think about the implications of what you have discovered through creating it.

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Lulu self-publishers introduce a new widget

For many people, a residual income stream can be earned by writing a book. Lulu.com is one of the places where the entire process is simplified, allowing you to self-publish and sell online. Whether your book sells thousands or just a few each month, once it is done, it is a long tail marketing technique.

The book may be a collection of white papers that you offer to each client or customer - for instance, I am just in the process of writing our Web PR book for SMEs, or it may be a children's book, or a tale of your business and its development. There is a book in all of us, so they say, and really, with Lulu and the like, you have little to lose and much to gain.

Widgets are all the rage at the moment, and Lulu has just introduced a neat shopfront widget to add to your website, blog, facebook etc. In an act of flagrant self-promotion, here is one for two of my books: JFDI Community Broadband: South Witham, and JFDI Community Broadband: Wennington.

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Traffic stats

Why is it that so many companies seem so disinterested in their traffic stats? This information tells you who is coming to your website, where your site is working (or not), what keywords are leading to your site from the search engines, who has linked to you etc etc etc. If you are ignoring your traffic stats because it just seems too much work to look at them regularly, think again.

Without this information your marketing plan must be operating in the dark. How can you know when a particular press release has worked if you don't look to see how many visitors it encouraged to your site? If you offer e-commerce facilities, how are you tracking whether people are going through the whole process and becoming a customer, or when they are falling off the site halfway through the shopping cart? How do you know when a particular backlink is successful, and therefore target other similar sites? How do you know when there is an influx of customers from a particular country? etc etc

There are a multitude of reasons for keeping an eye on your traffic stats. And for analysing them so you can make your marketing more efficient and cost-effective. This doesn't mean spending hours poring over columns of figures, but at least check that you are getting the most of your marketing spend.

* When you put a press release out or an ad, include a tracker URL (one that is specific to that press release) so you can see the response rate
* Check that the keywords you are spending money on, or have optimised the site for are actually bringing in traffic to the site
* Look and see which countries your visitors are coming from. If you are trying to break into the EU, for example, are your marketing efforts working?
* how long are visitors staying on your site? Is it "sticky" - are they staying for a look round or just leaving after 1 page, 1 minute etc? It is unlikely they will become a customer if they have paid so little attention to what you are telling them!
* is your site traffic increasing over time? Does the increase bear any relation to your spend? In other words, are you getting value for money? Or could you refocus your efforts onto the techniques that are actually working?

If you do just one thing today, it should be to look at your traffic stats... Go on, log into them now.

Has the number of visitors risen in the last 3 months? If so, can you work out why?

Are visitors leaving in droves from a particular page? Can you work out what is wrong with that page?

Are they failing to complete the purchase process? Try it yourself and see if there is anything wrong with it.

How long are people staying on the site? If less than 3 minutes, there is something failing to appeal to them and you need to increase the amount of time people stay on your site by adding interesting and tempting text and information, calls to action etc.

Where are the majority of your referrals coming from? The search engines, links on other sites, forums? Check the links on other sites and forums - make sure everything being said is positive. You never know, there might be people slagging off you and your products out there.

Are the keyword referrals those you expected to see? Or are people searching more frequently on terms you hadn't realised they might search on? If so, add information to your site that captures that traffic more effectively.

What is your top exit page? Take a long hard look at it and work out why.

There, not taken you long has it? And you have undoubtedly learnt several things that you hadn't realised before commencing this exercise. Now, take some action to correct the things that are wrong with your site, and have another look next week to see what the changes are to your stats.

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Targetting the younger income

Are your products and services aimed at a younger demographic? If so, you need to spek da lngwij!

As mobile phones become the must-have item we all own, including 4 year olds it seems, the English language is suffering.

Good spelling and grammar appear to be going out of the window as youngsters (and adults) attempt to cram their messages into 160 characters. This is having an impact not just in SMS speak, but is spreading into the real world and online.

In the real world we see it most commonly as a grammatical error in the overuse of the grocer's apostrophe eg potatoe's, taxi's etc. However, more and more often, it is the general misspelling of words. Not just commonly misspelt words, like accommodation but even potatos. If you offer acomodation, accomodation, or even acomodashun, you won't pick up search traffic from those who choose to type that into Google if your website only includes the correct spelling in its keywords.

And the sad thing is that, as our 8 year olds turn into young, well-heeled spenders, (who can't spell), looking to spend a weekend away with their partner, they are unlikely to fall across your hotel, guest house, B&B or campsite if you haven't realised that they will be spelling one of your key search terms wrongly when they look for you. Some of the problem is solved by search engines, such as Google, offering a spell check service and pointing them in the right direction. However, other search facilities, link directories etc don't.

Additionally, aside from misspelling keywords and phrases, there is the need to communicate effectively with your target audience. You need to write in a style that hits all the right buttons. Obviously, depending on your products and services, this needs to be approached in different ways, especially if you also target an older demographic who may not wish to read product information or articles in ... ahem, let's call it a 'contemporary style'!

For instance, let's take I want one of those.com (IWOOT) and consider the writing style. It's relaxed (or chillaxed as my kids would say), passionate, youthful, and appealing. It triggers the "I want one of those" emotions perfectly.

They achieve this by understanding their audience, and getting into their shoes.

As part of our Information Architecture process, we ask our clients to consider 5 different potential customers. Who they are, where they might work, what they wear to work, and start to think how to market to that person, or that demographic. You don't necessarily need to consider what they had for breakfast, or which brands they buy, but it does all help.

And then you need to write for those people, or that person. Speak their language.

For marketing to the younger generation, it is probably a good idea to get hold of a young person, tell them what you are trying to sell to them, and get them to describe it. It is quite amazing how differently this type of focus group activity can make you describe your product or services. Young people can usually be bribed with sweets or paid minimal amounts of money for this activity, and school holidays, when parents will do almost anything to entertain their children, are a good time for a recruitment drive if your target demographic is the under 18s!

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How to give information away for free, and why

You decide to produce a white paper to educate people about your products, or about one aspect of using your product. You want to offer it for free as a sales tactic, or to raise brand awareness, or as a service to existing purchasers of the product/services.

You push out a press release (or use another promotional strategy) and it hits some of the appropriate news sites, ezines etc. People start to click on the link to view or download the white paper.

And this is where so many people trying to use this promotion tactic get it wrong. What are these interested people, who are generally making a spontaneous decision to view your free white paper, faced with?

A sign up form.

Your personal details please. This can often be 20 or more fields asking questions about name, address, email, what sector they work in, job description, where they heard of you etc etc etc. And if they are lucky (not!), you will offer them a chance to click a few more times before they get close to the white paper - to view your privacy policy, to uncheck the box for further mailings, to read about the fantastic newsletter you will be sending out daily, etc.

DON'T DO IT! Let people download the white paper for free, unencumbered by form completion. Don't ask for personal details. You honestly don't need them.

Even a two field form - first name and email address - is a turn off. After all, they are going to ask themselves: what are you going to send me now you have that info? What are you going to do with my personal info?

It is likely they know nothing about you as a company, and you may be about to sell the email addresses for all they know. They do not want to have to look up your company history, reviews of your company and products etc just to download a free white paper which may or may not even be of interest to them.

It might be the most interesting and exciting white paper since sliced bread, but if you want to give it away for free, don't ask for anything in return.

Watch your traffic stats. How many people come to your download page and how many people actually signed up? Try asking for personal details from one set of ads, and not from another. Look at the difference in responses - there will be one and it might surprise you how many people are put off when you ask for their email address.

How to do it right.....

Include in your white paper calls to action to buy the product, sign up for a newsletter, and/or get in touch.

Try different adverts - wording, images etc.

Have different landing pages for each of your press releases or adverts about the white paper, all leading to the same download but with tracker URLs so you can see how many people responded to each advert. Then next time you can focus on the most effective ad.

For free info such as a white paper, don't harvest email addresses. If they are interested, they will get back in touch because you have given them full contact details, URLs of further information etc. Not because you bombard them with newsletters, autoresponders etc that may be of no further interest which they then need to unsubscribe from.

OR offer a non-compulsory registration to receive further information at this point. But don't make the download reliant on that registration. You want them to read about you, not be forced away by the need to register.

Make it easy for them to find further info without needing to pick up the phone.

Add specific pages to your site that deal with further issues leading on from the white paper, and track the number of visitors who come directly from the white paper. They are going to be far more interested in your products/services. After all, they have taken another step to find out more, and they have read the first white paper.

Include more calls to action on those pages and this is where you begin to harvest email addresses, more information about them etc but be gentle how many questions you ask at a time, or how much personal information you seek from them.

Offer a further white paper(s) within the white paper. You can ask for an email address at that point because they are expressing further interest, and you can ask them to register in order to get yet more free info from you. But it shouldn't be compulsory to register their details.

Internet marketers are a whizz at asking for basic registration details, and harvest enormous numbers of email addresses. You then find yourself on an autoresponder which sends out messages every time they come up with a new info product, or to follow up on the fact you haven't taken advantage of their latest offer, but it has been extended for 3 more days, and NOW is the time to buy etc. It gets quite tedious, and the pressure to buy is what the IMs count on and include emotional triggers each and every time they mail you.

Why do they do this?

Because Internet Marketers are making big bucks out of selling you their knowledge, software, tools etc. Really big bucks. But they also openly admit that their databases of email addresses often only include 50% or (much) less of people who have responded more than once to their marketing ploys.

Customer acquisition and loyal customers are important to you so don't put off over half of your respondents with your tactics the first time they come to you. Don't demand demanding personal details in exchange for a free white paper.

Let 'em have it. If they like what they see/read, they will be back. And if they aren't, then maybe, if they are to become a valued and valuable customer to you, and you are targetting your advertising/marketing to those places where they hang out, they'll see an ad of yours again, and be back anyway.

Don't waste marketing energy trying to gather up EVERYONE. Focus on those who are most likely to make a purchasing decision, and once they get in touch, treat them well and look after them.

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The 15 minute alarm

Further to yesterday's post about time logging, I found some code for the EEE PC which pops up a neat window every 15 minutes and asks, "What are you doing?" It is a good question much of the time, and it appears that my attention span at times can be less than that on the job I am supposed to be doing! It enters my response into a text file which allows me to see what the hell I have spent the last 8 hours on. I'll post the code here for anyone who wants it later, but it has prompted me to add a list of features required in my time logging software to a half-composed email to the developers of the one I am currently using.
* A pop up alarm clock demanding me to account of myself
* A calendar that shows all the up and coming deadlines, as well as those past due, and the work required
* An easy way to show not just jobs done, but percentage completed from the estimate given to the client, and therefore how much time is left to finish the task
* This would then show me in print how far out the time estimates have been over the years, and why I am still skint, and my clients are doing just fine on all the unbilled hours I have had to put in.

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Website Designers' Big Mistakes - keyword inclusion

Gordon Bennett - New York Times journalist, so I am told by my temporarily resident aunt, who is breaking the back of turning the house into a habitable domicile after 5+ years of it not being by sanding, painting and scrubbing - it all puts my efforts to shame. I digress....

Why, oh why, do website designers insist on spending weeks coding up an e-commerce site with full functionality, preparing it for launch, and only then come to the Web PR people? Today, I have battled with a live website, trying to get some SEO and user friendly features on to it.

Keywords? Pah! Barely a one in sight, or in site. "Did you ask the client for a list of keywords before you began?"
"No, they said they'd write the text."

Yes but, guys, the keywords don't just go in the text. That's the whole point.

So, armed with my own list of keywords, painstakingly gathered over the last few hours by indexing the client's own site, searching Google for their competitors and nicking some of theirs, Wordtracker, Google Adwords, Overture etc, I am now working through page titles, META tags, alt img tags, filenames, headings and of course, the visible text, to try and put in some of the keywords that are vital to getting this site found beyond the single keyword phrase the client and designer thought was all that mattered.

Then there are the missing calls to action, the lack of interactivity, CRM, content and all the other things that are required to put a halfway decent Web PR strategy together.

If you are a site designer, or know one, tell them that before they start designing anything, all those important keywords need to be built into their process. Every filename should be keyword rich, and hence every HREF tag, every image needs a keyword rich alt img tag, every heading needs to include keywords, etc etc. Let alone METAs and all that bog standard SEO stuff.

Because after all, those keywords are what your visitors searched upon in the first place. When they arrive on the site they want to know WIIFM (What's In It For Me) and that they are in the right place for they want. And that they haven't just landed on a site whose designer thought a bit of black hat SEO would do the job.

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More good sites out there. We found rather a lot today! Check out our delicious site for more weird and wonderful sites.

Time tracking. Always a problem when you are working on a variety of projects, often made up of many tasks, that build up into a billable whole. After some looking around, I have opted for the 30day trial of Easy Time Tracking. This is going to cause minor problems when work is done on the EEE PCs or the Mac but it does mean that tasks and projects can be more easily tracked.

Why this one? Well, mainly because it has a desktop widget that means you can easily click a task and client and start and stop the timer, without having to manually enter anything in a separate program. Now, if it had an alarm that went off every 15mins and asked, "What are you doing?" to force you to fill it in (and re-focus if you have suddenly found a great displacement activity to distract you!), it'd be perfect.

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WikiHow

This site is just great. Wikihow. It is an ever-growing online manual of how to do things. All sorts of things from how to make a network cable, through to poaching an egg, solving back problems with Pilates, in fact, you name it, it's here. Or will be soon.

If you want to market your website, and your products, then you'd do well to consider what you could put in Wikihow that might pull in some new customers. This is another site that shows the power of user-created content. You can put URLs in to a page, but expect them to be edited out over time if you are just blatantly self-advertising and not creating a useful article to help people in their daily lives. You can however create a useful how to article that contains keywords that tie in to your PPC campaigns so you are showing as a paid listing both at the side and below the articles.

And you can use it to complement your FAQs. Why write them all yourself if there is a huge number of people out there willing to help you do the work!! Links to sites such as these, which have the potential to become one of those great resources on the Internet over time, will give you street cred. Spend a few minutes on wikihow today and think what you could do there that might enhance your business vistors, brand awareness, product FAQ etc.

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My Business card or yours

Networking is the big thing. Many people attend networking events, or are part of an ever-growing number of social networking sites online. Savvy businesses are using social networks to promote their goods.

Networking allows you to push your business, products, or to make contacts in the supplier/customer chain.

But whose business card is the most useful? Yours or theirs?


Think about it.

You have a stand at an exhibition. Everyone who visits, you press a business card into their hand. They leave.

What happens to your business card? How do you contact them to see whether the discussions on the stand could lead to a successful, and hopefully profitable business relationship?

Did you ask them for their business card? How do you follow it up? Will they remember you, or will you be consigned to a spam filter's deathbox? How long do you leave it before you follow up on their business card? How do you make sure you are remembered?

Exactly the same is valid for your website. Every day, x number of visitors come to your website. Do you ever acquire their business card? Find out their contact details? Establish a personal relationship with them so that when you phone out of the blue they know who you are? (If you have a contact number for them even....)

This week's key conundrum is how to make personal relationships with your customers through your website. How to contact them, after their visit to your site, and engage them in a return visit or a return purchase.

So, today, think about how you ensure you get their business card during their visit to your website. How do you create opportunities to do so? How do you then contact them in a manner that is not spam, or unwanted intrusion? How do you build a customer to your website into a 'customer for life'?

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Word of Mouse matters

Customer Service Online - are you doing it?

When someone visits your shop, you will often make an attempt to engage with them, develop a relationship, find out who they are, encourage them to come back by telling them there is a sale on next month, acquiring their contact details - perhaps by signing up to a mail order catalogue, or finding out what they are looking for, and offering to find them that item.

Those shops which do not do this are reliant on non-personal relationships, huge marketing budgets, and cut-priced items to beat the competition. But in this world where personal relationships in commerce matter....
it is the shops who say, "£20.05. Oh, make it £20, we won't go bust over 5p" who actually manage customer retention successfully. It is the shops who have staff who ask, "Can I help you find what you need?" in a non-demanding or non-aggressive style who discover that they can provide exactly the service that customer is looking for, and potentially you have a customer for 'life', as well as some great PR. It is the shops who say, "You live down Acacia Avenue, don't you? Did you know we deliver free of charge there every day/Thursday/once a month? Would you like us to bring your magazines/meat/veg/parcels
etc on our rounds?"

These type of activities are what build a customer list of happy, satisfied customers who tell others. Offline, we call it word of mouth recommendations and online, it is called 'word of mouse'. It is important to understand it.

Now, look at your website. Do you provide the same standard of customer care there as you expect on your sales floor? Do you have any mechanism for approaching the visitors to your website live? Or letting them contact you easily? Or keeping in touch with them, long after they have left your store? Or do they visit, look around, and leave without you being any the wiser who they are and what they want than an anonymous IP address in your traffic stats?

Let's use Lulu.com as a first example of how to get it right. Lulu.com offers LiveHelp. You click, ask your question, and a real person responds in real time. You don't need to pick up the phone, visit the store, or make a great effort. Your question is answered promptly, and quite often, there is a follow up email which provides extra info. All of this adds in to the user experience. I, for one, am now one of a growing virtual sales force who promote Lulu at every opportunity, because they go one step beyond the necessary to deal with potential customers. It is far harder to contact Amazon than Lulu, and get a personal response.

Imagine going on to the BT site and finding that there is someone there, live, who is able to deal with your query, or find the answer, instead of spending an hour or more on hold to someone in India, and still not getting the answer? (This happened to me today and it wasn't the first time. I speak from a growing level of frustration with corporate customer service from consumers!)

When I come to your website, how do you deal with my enquiry? Do you have a customer enquiry form that gets sent to some unknown bod in an untitled department at some unknown email address? When will I get a reply? "We will respond to your request shortly" means nothing to a customer angling to find the right product and buy it today. If you do not offer an 'instant response' system, then you have probably just lost a customer. And they are unlikely to respond in future if they felt let down during their visit to your website, so having their email address may just make things worse in future.

Do you offer an FAQ? A freephone number? Teach them how to use Skype so they can make the call for free? Do you have video manuals for your products or for your website that help them through questions asked over and over again? (And if questions are being asked frequently, why haven't you addressed that issue with the documentation that comes with the products or on your product listings????)

If you offer free resources, such as white papers, do you ask for an email address, so you can send them further info in future? Or do you, as I found recently on a land sale agents' site, just let people download the land and auction details, without adding them to a list of people who might be interested in other similar land sales that might happen in future? In that case, it was worse than it seemed at the outset, because there was no correlation between telephone enquiries, downloads, and those who turned up at the auction. The land agent had no way of offering further land details to anyone at all except those who had telephoned in requesting the details to be sent. They could have been building a huge database of those interested in land, and bringing together sellers and buyers constantly. This would set them apart from other land agents, for starters.

If someone has found your site, spent time looking at your products, don't just let them leave without either:

1) harvesting their email address for future contact eg a newsletter with offers and competitions and upgrades.
2) persuading them to sign up for an rss feed (more anonymous and less intrusive than email). It is their choice if they access and read it but at least you know they may be reading info on your products
3) contacting them whilst on site. There are products that allow you to contact those surfing your site and ask directly, "Can I help?" This pops up in an unobtrusive window in their browser, which they can choose to ignore if they wish. However, many people often find that websites are difficult to navigate, they can't find what they are looking for, and that a little personal assistance is appreciated.
4) offering a free sample or white paper that they can receive in return for their email address and permission to market to them in future. This doesn't have to be onerous on the customer and many people seek out free samples and can be your best sales force when they post to many other sites saying, "I got this and it's fab." This has the benefit of increasing the number of links to your site and thereby your search engine rankings, as well as getting the word out to others who may be interested in your product range.

You can follow up this type of person with a number of autoresponses, sent out for free, which encourage them to promote you further. This is really worthwhile if you also run an affiliate scheme, whereby they earn commission for every sale that comes from a recommendation by them.

On that note, it is worth realising that a virtual sales force, who have been provided with the necessary marketing materials so they are on message for your product(s), is invaluable. If the commission is commensurate with the amount of work they need to do to see a return, then you will find that affiliates (and especially super-affiliates) are worth their weight in gold. A small company can double or treble its sales force for very little expenditure and reap dividends.

So, to sum up. When ANY visitor comes to your website who is interested in your products, you should be looking to acquire contact details from them. (Ditto for your shop, store, exhibition stand etc in the 'real world'.)
Treat people courteously and with respect. Even if all you do is refer them to a 'competitor' who does stock the product they are looking for, they are likely to remember you positively, and recommend you,even if they didn't buy from you.
Market to those who you know. Existing customers are cheaper to maintain than acquiring new ones. But don't miss an opportunity to acquire new ones and look after them!
Think out of the box.

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Spell check your website!!

There are far too many businesses out there who seem to think that the odd spelling mistake on their website will not affect how potential customers view them or their products. How are potential purchasers of your products going to know that those spelling mistakes don't also affect the quality of your product? Additionally, how are you going to be found on the search engines if a keyword is spelt incorrectly?

Spell check your website. There is no excuse for not copying and pasting the text of your pages into an online spellchecker such as Spellcheck.net thus ensuring that you begin to build trust with your website visitors from the word go with the right impression.

Additionally, you can use this type of application to ensure that your Ebay auction items sell at the highest price because people can find them. Amazing how many people are trying to sell a dingy rather than a dinghy, or an antic rather than antique!

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Crisis Management

Full marks to myspace today for removing the account of Tom Stephens from the public eye in response to the arrest on suspicion of the murders of five women in Ipswich, UK, this morning.

At around lunchtime today, there were links on most of the major newspaper sites to Tom Stephens myspace account. At the time the reports were written, he had 8 friends. By the time I visited, he had 7 - someone was on the ball and had distanced themself from him, fast.


Tonight, the myspace account relating to his ID is no longer available. However, undoubtedly journalists have taken screenshots of the myspace site, and followed up with those 7 friends to find out what they know about this part-time taxi driver, ex-Tesco's worker in Martlesham, and former special constable. These friends were based from Ipswich to Miami, to Hawaii (I think it was).

In the UK everyone, despite the media's best efforts, ought to be innocent until proven guilty. However, an association with this type of news story can be fatal for a business, and crisis management is vital.

Myspace have taken prompt action - I'd have had the account paralysed and invisible the moment the news story broke about his arrest because the media were onto his myspace account at least one day earlier and reporting on it in the Sunday papers but even so, good on them to move as fast as they could.

Trouble is, tonight the photos from his myspace account are all over the news, and whether or not this man is charged with murder(s) or not, myspace will now be inextricably linked in many people's minds as the source of the personal information.

How do you conduct crisis management, and when should you act? Does it require 5 murders to become aware of the need for crisis management, or should all website owners be aware of how to deal with a crisis, were it to arise, however serious or seemingly trivial the emergency?

A blog can allow instant response on the site without technical knowledge to change HTML etc. Being able to 'comment out' pages so they cease to exist can be done if the website is designed simply and logically. Keeping a regular eye on links to your website, and your server stats eg traffic to the site, can mean you spot any unusual activity very quickly and can deal with it. Checking your email regularly can mean you pick up on a breaking story that involves you and your business before the backwash drowns you.

It's no different than damage limitation in the old days, but news stories can break so fast these days and become global instead of just local within minutes or hours instead of weeks or days because of the Internet. You cannot afford to not watch your stats, email etc. Not just because these may indicate positive trends, but also because they may well forebode negative ones.

There are ways to make use of breaking news stories, eg write a blog story with some kewyords in the first paragraph, and put a link to a crisis management or web pr course with a paypal button on it to share your experience with others about how to grab headlines with the Suffolk Strangler or Ripper story and show that you know enough to get a top 10 listing on Google. (We've left the Paypal button out for now in respect to the Ipswich women who have died so tragically).

BUT if you need your site promoting, you need fast action, and a team who can make 2 plus 2 = many more visitors in order to get your website promoted whatever the news, you need Cybersavvy.

We wish the police good luck in solving these crimes in Ipswich, and hope that this arrest in Trimley, Felixstowe does bring the necessary results in finding the bastard who killed these women. Just because they worked as prostitutes doesn't devalue their lives. And it doesn't stop us working to show that life goes on. Because sadly, it has to.

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Claiming back your time from spam

Claiming back your time........dealing with spam and nuisance calls

What I had to do to deal with spam and nuisance calls which were eating away my precious days. I'm a single mum and I want my kids to know more than my back!

I used to post loads of articles which finished with a resource box/about me that included my email address. That way you get business, website visitors etc, but now I use an image file instead which doesn't succumb as easily to bots/harvesters, though I know my address is still on a lot of sites. Many forums are really badly designed as it's very easy to harvest active addresses, so I think before I post to any forum - how do they display contact info?

When I contact a website asking for info or have to log in somewhere, I use a specific email address that relates to them. If that gets out, I can refer to my database and go totally ballistic with that company for sharing info against their own privacy policy, or I send them an article on the law and they find they just lost my business and recommendations to others. I have unlimited aliases so this is really easy. If someone abuses a particular email address, I just put a filter on and they go straight into the held mail file and I don't see them again.

I still have the same primary address I had 11 years ago and the spam is unreal. I regularly clear out 5-10k+ spam a week, often more - Bill Gates gets 4 million a day, way to go! You ever wondered why MS are getting into the fight spam war?!

I pay $30/yr (which is nowt compared to the value I put on my time) for spamcop.net which seems to eliminate between 90 and 97% of all my emails but I only lose 1:1000 worthwhile emails to the spam filters, which took me 5 clickboxes to set up. It takes me a few minutes each week to delete all the spam from my Held mail file, except that I sometimes spend a while spotting the trends so I can warn my clients, friends, family etc.

I delete anything that has got through the spam filters (into my Spamcop Inbox) that I don't want before it gets sent to my email account. This way it doesn't clutter up my Eudora folders any more or waste bandwidth, and once everything comes in from my mail server it is filtered into folders anyway. Typically it's about 10% of each day's mails are crud and, depending on the number of mails, it takes a couple of minutes to delete them in Spamcop.

Because I have already scanned the emails I'm letting through, I can prioritise my day based on what I know is on its way or was sent overnight. On busy days, I do miss things, I know that, but that's just doing too much and being too interested in too many things!

I can let people know really quickly by phone that the mail they sent hasn't arrived. When you're dealing with info for press releases, website updates etc that are time critical, this matters. Spamcop is pretty fast, and I don't mind paying them for the service.

The days that are bad are when someone sends spam with false headers so it seems to come from one of my domains and I get all the bounces etc. But you just choose ALL, then unclick any mail in that delivery you want to keep. This type of activity can account for several thousand emails per 10 mins and it's a relief to be able to deal with them quickly (1,000 per 10-20secs now! My speed reading of subject lines has improved loads). Even with 2Mbps broadband, it used to take ages to download them and delete them from within Eudora, and some had nasty payloads which attacked my network.

There's another thing, I haven't seen a virus in months - touch wood. I've never used Outlook anyway but I get so many calls from people who don't understand the need for antivirus s/w and updates and a pukka firewall. And last time I got hit with a drop dialler was 8 years ago - bin your dial up before you get hit with calls to Paraguay!

Each time I report spam (a one click process), I get a warm glow and know I won't see them again! Because I get SO many mails and my address has been around a while, I think I might be one of those first in line for new spam and I like to think I might be able to stop them before they get everyone else.

I now post my 0845 efax.co.uk phone number to all websites, forums etc which goes to a virtual answer machine which emails me every msg. I rarely give out my landline or mobile unless I know the person/organisation. (The worst offenders for mobile spam seem to be TV programmes who ask you to vote. I've had to stop the kids doing it after I couldn't find privacy policies on the TV show websites.)

If there is no attachment on my voice msg email, I know no-one spoke and they all go in the trash folder en masse - highlight all, delete, bye. Ditto my fax number. All faxes arrive by email as .tif, and as no-one has asked for my fax number in months, I haven't printed one! Who sends faxes anyway these days?!! I empty that Eudora folder on a monthly or so basis without even looking at them.

I have gone from having to delete 25k msgs because I went skiing for a week, to actually waiting for emails to arrive because it's all gone quiet!! And I haven't had a nuisance call since I got my 0845 number. I'm not saying either of these services are the best, but it's what I researched and had to start using when it was taking me till Wednesday to clear the backlog of mails which had arrived over the weekend.

And now I have FREE TIME! Oh yes, look at it, time for bed!

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Make a shorter link

Make a shorter link..........ever found that those links you use for affiliate programs etc are just way too long to post in an email, or they look really clunky? Well use one of the shorter link programs to make life easier all round.

Whole handful of them here

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Test post

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Speed up your computer

Well, there is so much going on that it is almost impossible to find time to put all the Web PR content onto the site these days, so we are resorting to a Blog. So, here goes......


Do you find hundreds of programs taking up precious time and space when your computer starts up? And you don't even know what they are for?!!!

This site sorts all those problems out........

Pac's Portal. Spend a short time here finding out what is on your computer, and deleting the stuff which slows it down!!

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