So, along with getting healthy, drinking less, exercising more and vowing to do a number of other activities in 2012, think about making some of these changes to your Twitter account and activity:

Filter Who You Follow

You may be following a number of accounts that are no longer active. Following these accounts is a waste of time. Plus it’s generally seen to be better if you have a higher ratio of follower’s to those your follow. This helps to reduce the amount of wasteful people your follow.

You should also make sure that you’re following relevant accounts/people. Are they relevant to your industry? Do they add quality content to your news feed? Get rid of anyone who isn’t relevant or useful.

Create/Update Your Lists

Organise the people you follow into lists. This is an easy way of viewing the updates of key people. Create lists for your customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, industry leaders etc. You may want to make some of these private.

Quality vs Quantity

Now is the time to review what you’re tweeting. It’s not just a numbers game – more isn’t necessarily better. Make sure every single tweet is valuable to those following you and reflects well on your as a business.

Have you any other Twitter resolutions? Leave us a comment below!

We’ve talked about how to use Twitter for business before on the SMEketing online marketing blog, but we thought since we’ve started a new year, we should do a quick refresher post on how you can use it to help grow your business.

How To Use Twitter For Business, Top Tips:

• Make sure your account has been fully set up: Add a proper photo or logo and relevant information. Make sure your profile page is as informative as possible. This is the page that a lot of people will view before following you – so make sure you make a good impression!
• Take your time: Don’t immediately follow every person/account that follows you. Make sure you’re following the right people – people in your industry, competitors, customers, thought leaders. Who you follow says a lot about your online marketing strategy – make sure you’re giving the right message.
• Share valuable information: Sharing links to information which helps promote your product or services is great. But make sure that’s not all you tweet about. Try and make your Twitter feed well rounded – include industry information, customer/service updates, news and advice.
• Be consistent: Make sure you have time to manage your Twitter account. This means replying to any messages or @ replies, conversing on a one to one basis with other users, sharing other users information (retweeting). This must be done on a regular basis for it to have any positive effect. Done correctly and consistently, you’ll be able to create long lasting relationships and create an impression of thought leadership.
• Don’t be negative: As much as you might want to sometimes tell the world about some immoral methods of your competitors, or a poor quality delivery from a supplier, try to resist. What you tweet reflects on you, and it’s always good to take the high-ground. Don’t air your dirty laundry in public!
• Take advantage of the tools available: At SMEketing we love Hootsuite – you can use this to schedule tweets in advance, track any clicks of your shortened links and monitor all messages, @ replies and keywords you make want to track. Another tool we love is TweetDeck.
• Be patient: You’re unlikely to take any orders or make any sales on your first day using Twitter. So be patient and consistent, and you’ll find sooner or later it’s paying off. If your goal isn’t to make sales, you could track things like interaction, visits to your website from Twitter, RTs etc.

Remember, you can follow SMEketing on Twitter: @SMEketing.

If you want more information on how to use Twitter for business please get in touch with us, or visit our social media management information page.

So in no official order, below are the top ten most read blog posts of 2011:

Top Email Marketing Checks To Do Before You Hit Send

Email marketing is a very effective way to communicate with your current and prospect customers. It’s quick, inexpensive and can give you instant results. But it’s important that it’s done right. Make sure you make the most of each eblast by making the following email marketing checks: From Name Is your ‘From’ name recognisable? Will …

Read more »

Google+ For Business

If you’ve been in a coma recently, you might not have heard about Google’s new social media platform, Google+! Even though it’s been around now for a few weeks, there’s still some confusion over how to use it and what it could mean to you both personally and as a business. The service is Google’s …

Read more »

Building Your Email Marketing List : Research Results

A couple of months ago, MarketingSherpa released the results of a study they had undertaken, into the most effective methods of growing an email marketing list. The researchers asked more than 1100 marketers to indicate the effectiveness of various methods used within their organisation. This is what they found: Although these results are based on …

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Top Black Hat SEO Techniques You Must Avoid

Wikipedia describes black hat SEO as “SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service and is often considered unethical SEO.” The alternative is white hat SEO, which are the techniques that are approved by the search engines …

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Reciprocal Linking – Good or Bad SEO?

If you’ve got a new website and you’re trying to optimise it and improve it’s position in the search engine results for your desired key terms, you may be aware that link building is an important area of SEO that you need to focus on. So it could be tempting to respond positively to an …

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Secrets of Successful Blogging

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase “we blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Ever since then, people have been blogging for business and for …

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Top Ten Google AdWord Mistakes – Part Two

Following from our previous post last Thursday, here are the additional five mistakes that we see people make in their Google AdWord Campaigns: 6. Not targetting the right group of searchers: Is your product or services aimed towards a particular demographic or geographical location? Did you know that you can set your AdWord campaigns to target those …

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MegaBus Robots.txt File Fail

I am organising a trip up to London with some friends in September. We’ve decided to save some money and use the MegaBus to travel from Southampton. Due to my love of all thing organising, I was put in charge of sorting out the costs etc. So first thing I did was to Google MegaBus. …

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Online Promotion: How to promote a new offer, product or service online

Online promotion is a key marketing method for small businesses. If you’re promoting a new offer, product or service, how can you market it online? One of the key benefits of the Internet is that it creates an even platform – allowing smaller businesses to promote themselves at a relatively low cost. But you still need …

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Small Business Branding, Logo and Corporate Identity – What’s the Difference?

Okay small business owners, I have some questions for you here: How many of you reading this, know what your logo is? (I’m really hoping you’re nodding along, safe in the knowledge that you know what your logo is! I’ll be scared if  you don’t, unless you’re just starting a new business and haven’t had a …

Read more »

If you want to start 2012 with a bang, get in touch. We love helping businesses grow through using effective online marketing. So if you want more leads, more sales and more growth in 2012 drop us an email or complete our contact form.

• You build relationships through engagement
• Your content will be shared through social media
• People are more likely to comment if they are engaged
• People will stay on your site longer
• People will come back to your site more often
• Prospective customers will trust you and will more more likely to contact you

So how do you go about engaging your readers? It’s not easy, but here are some tips:

Content is king!

How many times have we said that here at SMEketing? It’s the mantra we live by. Without good quality content, your site will never get ranked and will never achieve its goals. Writing high quality blog posts and articles that tackle industry issues, that solve problems, that educate and advise your readers is the key to your success. If you’re answering a problem via a blog post and it successfully helps one of your readers, there’s a very good chance that they’ll come back to your blog on a regular basis and they’ll also tell others about their experience.

Take time to think about your titles

We always talk about the important of subject lines in email marketing, but it’s also important to take this theory and apply it to your other content. The titles are the first things people read – they’re what pulls them in to read more. You’ll use the title when promoting your content in social media and many people will use the title as the anchor text if they’re linking to you. So make sure your titles has been designed to lure people in. And while you’re at it, try to add a good keyword in there too, so any links you do get have good anchor text.

Make it easy to comment and share

The Internet has changes rapidly in the last few years. People want to engage with you – so make sure you make it easy for them! If you want people to comment – make it easy, don’t force them to register with your site before they can do it. Likewise, if you want them to share it on social media sites make it easy – give them a button, let them click and share. Voila! Easy peasy. Remember, it’s an unfortunate fact that people are lazy. We want to be able to do things quickly and easily. No one wants to take the time to open their Twitter in a browser, cut and paste the link (sometimes going via a link shortening tool to do this first), cutting and pasting the title then sharing it. Install a plugin and make it easy for them, otherwise they won’t do it!

Remember to add a call to action

If you want readers to comment, want them to share or even want them to retweet a tweet, then you have to ask them to do it. Sometimes just saying ‘Pls RT’ at the end of a tweet will get people to retweet it. Likewise asking people to leave a comment also works.

Build relationships

If someone comments on your content (be it a blog post, and article or even through a tweet), then please say thank you. Manners cost nothing! Have you ever left a comment on a blog, only to get an email a day or so later saying someone had commented on your comment… you go back to that page to see that the blog owner has personally thanked you for your input. It feels good. It takes hardly any time at all to go back and say thanks. It also shows other would-be commenters that you appreciate any engagement you get.

To summarise, engaging with your readers is something that takes effort and time. But if you remember to be polite and appreciative and direct people to do the things you want then you’ll start to see an increase in engagement levels.

Have you had any success in getting people to engage with you and your content? Give us your tips in the comments below.

1. Go to Google Analytics and review your traffic levels – are you seeing a sudden drop or any other worrying trends?
2. Log into Google Webmaster and see if there are any problems with your site – are there any crawl errors, messages from Google etc?
3. Go to Google and do this search: [site:yoursite.com] – review how many URLs are listed. Is this what you would expect or are you missing quite a few?
4. See what position your site comes up when you make this search: “domain-name” search (without the TLD). If you’re in position 50 or below it’s pretty likely that you’ve got some kind of penalty
5. Has your Google PageRank dropped suddenly? This isn’t always obvious since Google only updates this every 3-4 months, but it’s worth a look just in case
6. Check that your site hadn’t been blacklisted as unsafe for browsing. Type http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com (with your domain at the end)
7. Check your inbound links – has there been a sudden rise in poor quality links?
8. Check your outbound links – make sure you’re not linking to any questionable sites. Use http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
9. Do you have more than one website? If so check thse. Sometimes Google has seemed to devalue the WHOIS domain owner which results in the dropped ranks of all the sites under the same domain account.
10. Take a sentence from one of your website pages – cut and paste this exactly into Google with quote marks surrounding it (exact match). Check to see if the page you took it from ranks at the top
11. Add this bit of code to the search URL : &filter=0 (or click on the “show omitted results” link). If your site shows under this search it means that you’ve been hit with a duplicate content penalty

If you have been penalised then you need to make sure that you identify what it is that you’ve done to cause the penalty. Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines to ensure you comply.

Here’s a video from Google’s SEO spokesperson, Matt Cutts, where he talks about sites that have been penalised and how long these generally last for:

Link building, done correctly, should be a steady process – with a wide variety of links being generated, with a variety of anchor text pointing to a variety of pages.

What kind of activities should you be careful about?

Building too many links at one time: If your website has been ticking along for the last few years, without much work or SEO done to it, you might not have generated many inbound links. If you suddenly start on an Internet marketing campaign with the goal to boost your website, even if you’re doing things the right way, Google may be wary of you if you suddenly go from 5 links to 500 within a week. This is known as ‘link velocity’, and as Tad Chef from the SEOptimize blog says:

“Google is checking the link velocity – aka the rate in which you earn links – and if you get more links than you deserve, you risk a penalty even if the links are perfectly legit.”

Using identical anchor text in links: Anchor text is the clickable part of a link. Having your keywords in this anchor text is a good thing – it tells the search engines exactly what that particular link is about. However, when people naturally link to you, they wouldn’t always use the same anchor text – one person will use a different phrase to describe your business or a web page than another. So having all your inbound links with the same anchor text looks unnatural, and therefore will raise flags.

Getting links from the same sources: Variety is not only the spice of life, it’s the spice of link building too! You need to ensure you’re getting links from a wide range of websites. Getting a high number of links from the same site can look unnatural.

What are the common Google penalties?

Common penalties include:

• Any position 1 or 2′s being dropped to 6 and being stuck there (which was noted for the first time back in 2007, and is called  Google #6)
• All rankings being dropped by 30 places (named the 30 penalty)
• Particular rankings being pushed to the last position (known as the 950 penalty, as it’s an average of a drop of 950 places!)
• Complete ban

Take this case study from from SEOptimize. They wanted to test whether or not generating a high number of low quality links at once would result in any penalties. Author Marcus Taylor went about generating 10,000 spammy links to a new website he created specifically for the experiment. You can see the traffic volume the site was getting below:

Although the test site reached the number 1 position for its target keyword within a few weeks, eventually it was kicked out completely from these rankings. According to Taylor:

“Just as I was beginning to lack faith in Google’s ability to detect the most unnatural of link patterns, the site suddenly dropped out of search results for everything including brand searches, and what’s more it’s never bounced back.”

So what can you take away from this? Besides the obvious, “It’s not a great idea to build 10,000 low quality inbound links at once,” this case study also illustrates why it’s so important to develop a range of different link types over time. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – instead of relying on just one method to generate inbound inks, use a range of activities that will help to generate a natural link profile.

Avoiding Penalties

Make sure that your link building is done naturally and at a steady pace. Focus on generating and promoting high quality content. Avoid any black hat SEO activities, such as keywords stuffing, using link farms and other dubious link building activities. The goal is to build up a natural looking link profile – full of nice, high quality links.

If you’re looking for some link building help, please get in touch with us today! Email info@SMEketing.com or complete our contact form.

Most email providers will only display about 50 characters of the subject line. So if you thought creating tweets with just 140 characters was tough, then this can seem impossible! But fear not, there’s certain things you can do to try and really make the most of these 50 little characters.

Newspapers

If you read newspapers, next time take the time to really look at the headlines. Newspapers have to create headlines using a similar amount of characters to email subject lines. Look at how they convey the subject of the news item, yet manage to make it compelling enough for you to read on.

Put important information first

Since most email platforms will display 50 characters of your subject line, make sure you put the most important information first. You can go over 50 characters, but if there’s anything you really want the recipient to read make sure you put this first.

Support the ‘From’ line

Think about what you’ve got in the ‘From’ line and make sure your subject compliments it, rather than duplicates it. For example, you might have ‘Company XYZ’ as your From, so to have ‘Latest new from Company XYZ’ as your subject is a waste of space since readers already know where the email is from.

Try adding some urgency

Adding something like ‘Order by midnight tonight’ gives a level of urgency to your emails. You can promote your offers by sending out a flow of emails, counting down to the end of the offer (but be careful about sending too many emails. Maybe send one five days before the offer expires, then one with just 24 hours remaining).

Be careful not to get caught up in spam filters

Certain words have a tendency to raise red flags for spam filters. Some of these are terms you would use genuinely, but unfortunately spammers use them also. So just be aware of some of the terms that may get you caught out. This blog post from Sendblaster has a long list of terms you might want to avoid. In addition, don’t use too many exclamation marks or use full capitals in your subject line.

Once you’ve created your email, you can run it through a spam checker. A lot of email marketing software tools have these, including SMEmail. Instead of just scanning your content for “spammy words”, SMEmail will pass your email through real spam filters and tell you which ones it passes and which failed. SMEmail will also run your email through a number of key spam firewalls – the gatekeepers for most ISP’s and large corporations.

Remember the four U’s

• Useful: Is the message you are giving valuable to your readers?
• Ultra-specific:  Is is instantly clear to your reader’s what your promising?
• Unique: Is the subject line remarkable and compelling?
• Urgent: Does your subject line make the reader want to open your email and read it straight away?

For more information on our email marketing software, SMEmail, please get in touch or visit our SMEmail service page. At just £5 per plast plus 1p per recipient, it’s one of the most competitively priced email tools available.

From Name

Is your ‘From’ name recognisable? Will it tell the reader instantly who the email is from? Using ambiguous names like ‘info’, ‘marketing’ or even leaving it blank is a sure fire way to get your email deleted immediately.

Subject Line

Is your subject line compelling? Does it describe what the reader will find in your email and does it lure them into opening your email? Keep it short, relevant and if possible try to add some kind of hook or urgency to it.

Pre Header

A lot of emails sometimes have some copy above the main email content. A lot of people use this to say ‘Is this email not loading properly? Click here to view it on the web’. But although that’s useful information, it’s a bit of a waste. At SMEketing we use Outlook to receive our emails, and we get a window popping up at the bottom of the screen when a new email arrives. It displays the from, subject and an opening snippet of text. Now if you had put ‘Is this email not loading properly?…’ as your opening text, that’s what we’d see. Surely it’s better to put something interesting and compelling instead? Something that will make your readers stop what they’re doing and open your email immediately.

Message Body

Make sure you have a good, strong call to action. What’s the point of this email? Do you want people to download a brochure, contact you for a quote, make a purchase? You can to tell people to do what you want through the use of carefully crafted call to actions throughout your email. Make sure your offer is clear, match it with a strong call to action, then link it through to a dedicated landing page that matches that offer – both in terms of wording and style.

Testing

Have you done any A/B split tests? Try testing the subject lines to see what impact that has on open rates. Test different call to actions or different offers. Most email marketing tools, including SMEmail, have sophisticated A/B split testing features. You send two different versions of your email to a small percentage of your email list, then select the winner and send to the rest.

Find out more about SMEmail, our email marketing tool. From just £5 per blast plus 1p per recipient, you’ll find it harder to find a better priced, more sophisticated email marketing software solution. For a FREE SMEmail account, please email SMEmail@SMEketing.com now!

Extra content for the search engine robots

The backbone of SEO is content. The more content the search engines can find and index the better. If you’ve got a well rounded blog, covering a range of different topics, you’ll have more chance of being found for a wide range of terms (and your long tail terms will get a boost too). If you’re having trouble creating regular content for your blog a guest author could help out by giving you a post on a regular basis to add. You can schedule these in whenever you need a break (or during busy times when your efforts may be taken elsewhere in the business).

Variety for your readers

Guest blog posts help to keep you blog fresh, but also gives an additional viewpoint and tone of voice. As they say, variety is the spice of life! Having a good range of blog posts with a variety of content and views makes your blog more rounded and helps to keep visitors engaged, as well as giving them a reason to come back on a regular basis.

A different range of keywords

Because everyone has a different tone of voice and a different writing style, you’ll find that by using guest bloggers you’ll get a different way of promoting the topics that you want to focus on. A lot of the time guest bloggers may approach you, in which case you can tell them the topic you want written about and the keywords you want targeted. But how they go about writing those keywords into their copy, and the different synonyms and ways of saying these terms is up to them. You have the right to edit or amend your guest posts, but you might find it beneficial to keep them as they are (apart from spelling and grammar fixes), as they may have a fresh or different approach to your own posts.

More content to support your social media marketing

If you’re active on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+, you’ll know that they live off fresh content. You need to constantly promote new content – be it your own or others (which is always a good way of doing it, please don’t constantly promote your own content alone!). The more blog posts you upload, the more content you have to tweet about and the more posts you can add to your Google+ and Facebook page. You need to keep a steady stream of communication going in these mediums, and guest blogging gives you this.

Additionally, you can bet that if your guest author is an active blogger, they’ll also be active on the major social networking sites. And they want to promote their content just as a much as you do. So you’ll also benefit from them tweeting the blog post to their network of followers. Although it’s their content, it’s on your blog, so you’ll be opening up your site to a whole new range of people/contacts that you previously didn’t have access to.

Plus, we’re seeing that Google and the other search engines are starting to place more emphasis on social signals – so each tweet, mention, Facebook like or Google+ share is an additional signal, all pointing in your direction!

Generate more high quality inbound links

If your guest author promotes their post on their own blog or website, then you’ll get a good quality inbound link from that promotion. Even if you only get one link from them, it’ll be a high quality link (good anchor text, from an authoritative site, on a relevant page with relevant content surrounding it), so it’s worth it. Lots of these individual links soon grows to a wide and diverse link portfolio for your blog.

Attract a new wave of visitors to your blog

In an ideal world, your guest blogger will be well known in their industry, and have a loyal base of regular readers already. This is a great way of adding value to your blog, so when they promote their guest post to their readers, you’re essentially driving traffic from their site to yours. Even if you only get a few of those readers to come back to your blog again, you’ve managed to successfully increase your readership.
If you’re struggling with generating enough content for your blog, or you just want someone to manage the proces for you, please get in touch, or read about our Content Marketing services. Alternatively, if you’re an active blogger and fancy writing a guest post for SMEketing, get in touch!

We are very excited to announce our SMEmail November Sale.

All new customers signing up for a free SMEmail account in November 2011 will recieve 25% off ALL emails sent during that month.

So what do you get?

• Free SMEmail account
• 25% discount on all mails sent during the month of November 2011
• Access to over a dozen html email templates
• Easy to use WYSIWYG editor and user interface
• A/B split testing
• Segmenting and personalisation
• Auto responders and drip campaigns
• List management
• Custom subscribe, confirm and unsubscribe pages
• Social sharing
• Send from your own email address
• Real-time reporting

How much?

Standard prices are just £5 per blast, plus 1p per contact. So an eblast to 2000 contacts would cost you £25, but new customers signing up in November will get a 25% discount all November long.

Register Now!

With SMEmail, there are no contracts, no setup fees, and no nasty lock-ins. You can cancel at any time.