From today customers can get four optimised, relevant and well researched blog posts a month for only £199!

We understand that writing a blog post each month can be really tough. When you’re running a business or a busy marketing department, sometimes it’s the content creation that gets put on the back-burner whilst other activities are taking over your life!

Since we love copywriting we thought we’d put this package together for you to take advantage of. We currently write a lot of content for our existing customers on a regular basis, but thought we’d put together a nice little package so others could take advantage of these services.

As well as writing the blog posts we’ll optimise them for relevant keywords. And we know that sometimes brainstorming content ideas can be just as hard work as writing the darn things themselves, so we’ll do that for you too! Generally we put together a list of subject ideas and run them past you first. Once we’ve worked with you a while a lot of our clients then just let us crack on with it, trusting us to write the content that works best for their business.

We can send these to you on a weekly basis, or if you’d prefer we can send you all four at the beginning of each calendar month, so you can add them into your website and schedule them to go live whenever you please (scheduling blog posts en-mass in advance is a huge timesaver!)

So get this offer now!

SMEketing Blog Post Writing Service

The post SMEketing’s New Blog Writing Service appeared first on www.smeketing.com.

However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The tricky part comes when you have to try and put together some words and pictures that will not only encourage your customers to open the email, but also to go ahead and make some email sales for your company.

Writing email sales copy doesn’t have to be the stuff of nightmares. With a little forward planning and some useful tips and tricks, anyone can become an email sales genius and get the results they need.

Tips for email sales copy

Who is it from?

Most people will look to see who an email is from before deciding whether to open it or not. In the same way we check postmarks and logos on letters that come through the door, the email ‘from’ line is a filter that will decide if your email is destined to be read, or for the trash.

Stick to recognised brand names for your company, and once you’ve picked one, stay consistent to build up trust.

What is it about?

The next hurdle to overcome is the subject line. In just 50 characters or less, you need to get a message across that will encourage your customer to click open the rest of your email.

Keep it as simple as possible, and avoid salesy pitches here, as they are likely to get the big red X immediately.

Go for something informational, such as ‘Our January Newsletter’ to get a positive response, or if you are running a promotion, try personalising it to your customer, i.e. “50% off for Becky until January 10^th”.

Getting past the spam filter

Your subject line as well as the sender’s details will have some bearing on whether the customer ever gets to see the email at all. All email programmes have some level of spam filtering built in, so when writing your email sales copy you’ll need to make sure you are not inviting the filter to block your mail.

Avoid capitalising entire words or repeating the same word over and over (FREE, FREE, FREE) and don’t use numerous exclamation marks in the subject.

Your email

So you’ve made it past the human and spam filtering process, but now what do you want to say?

Writing the body text for an email will depend largely on what you are trying to achieve and who your audience is, but as a rule of thumb should contain the following components:

• Intention: why have you sent this email?
• Offer: what is the reason they need to buy from you?
• Messaging: Reinforce your brand and relationship with your customer by reflecting your messaging in the email
• Call to action: Ask for the sale

If you can put an email together with all these basic components, you have the start of a fantastic email sales campaign. Don’t forget, nobody expects you to get it right first time, and if it doesn’t work so well then at least you’ll have some valuable statistics and data on which to build a revised campaign for next time.

If you want to start email marketing today, request your free SMEmail account now!

The post Writing Successful Email Sales Copy appeared first on www.smeketing.com.

However, getting us to set you up on Twitter is the easy part. If you’re planning on managing your Twitter account yourself (we can do this for you if it all seems too daunting), then you need to fully understand how Twitter works and how you should be using it.

So here is a very quick and Twitter basics guidebook, which should help answer some of your basic Twitter questions. Click on the toggles below to reveal the answers.

But remember – Twitter is something that gets easier the more you use it. We often suggest that our clients sign up to a personal account so they can get used to using it on a regular basis in their daily lives. Once they understand how it works and how they can effectively use it to communicate with others, they soon realise how beneficial it can be to their business.

The post Twitter Basics Guidebook appeared first on www.smeketing.com.

Most of the companies we talk to understand the requirement to generate leads, but many, especially those trading as B2B’s (business to business), find it difficult and aren’t sure of the best practice techniques they should be employing.

So we thought we’d put together this easy read, easy to understand eBook which is jam-packed full of useful, actionable best practice advice, hints and tips.

In this 25 page eBook you will learn:

• What Lead Generation Is
  • The landing page
  • The form
  • Inbound leads
  • Successful lead generation processes
  • Lead generation in practice
• Lead Generation Tips and Tricks
  • Traffic generation
  • Using the homepage
  • Using product pages
  • Using your blog
• 20 Best Practice Lead Generation Tips
• Lead Management

To get your free copy, just subscribe to our email marketing newsletter. You will receive the PDF eBook via email straight away. Thanks!

The post New Free eBook: An Introduction to Lead Generation appeared first on www.smeketing.com.

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No, I’ve not heard of that event before. It sounds similar to a lot of these kind of events though. In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve been to these things before, and I just don’t think it’s value for money. It’s a lot of money and you can’t learn everything there is to know about link building in just one day. And there’ll be a constant, subtle selling of their services – which is why they’re hosting it really in the first place. Because they’re targeting a large audience – it means they have to keep it quite generic to make sure it’s doesn’t alienate anyone in the class. But that means that you don’t really get to the nitty gritty details, or any specifics about you, your business or your own website.

I find the best place to learn about SEO is to regularly read online blogs from industry leaders. Online marketing changes so quickly that you the best place to learn about the changes is online – events and training etc just can’t keep up really. By the time they’ve written the agenda, it may well be out of date already!

The blogs I recommend are:

• http://www.highrankings.com/newsletter/
• http://blog.hubspot.com/
• http://searchengineland.com/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog
• http://searchenginewatch.com/
• http://www.seobook.com/blog

This is also a good read: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo. I have all of these blogs either on email subscriptions (so I get an email each time they post a new blog), or into my Google Reader (now Feedly, RIP Google Reader!) so that I can just log on and see a stream of all their latest blog posts in one place.  I normally log on every few days and have a browse – I don’t read everything, just things that interest me.

You could visit the above sites and do a search in their search box for link building. I found these articles http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/26139/An-Introduction-to-Link-Building-Understanding-the-Anatomy-of-a-Link.aspx and http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29278/The-8-Best-Link-Building-Tactics-to-Boost-Off-Page-SEO.aspx on the Hubspot blog that would be useful for beginners looking to understand more about link building.

Also, don’t get too fixated on link building. Links are just one part of the SEO process. Years ago they used to be the main way that Google determined a website’s authority, but now it’s just one part. Other things like social signals, traffic, website quality etc can have a much greater impact. Also link building needs to be done organically – if you suddenly go from 20 links to 200 links in a couple of weeks it’s going to start looking suspicious. Sites are now also being penalised for having poor quality links – so links on low quality websites and lots of duplicate keyword anchor text on the links. So there’s a risk that you might focus too much time, effort and money on your link building, only to be doing more harm than good.

Most people get links by raising their profile in their industry – so being active on forums and commenting on blogs, sharing content through social sites, guest blogging, and by creating wonderful content that people naturally want to link to. But like most things, it takes time. You’re not going to immediately get loads of links or start ranking really well straight off the bat.

Attached is an updated link profile from my paid tool (if you’re reading this on the SMEketing blog, please get in touch if you’d like a report of your inbound links). It says you’ve got just over 400 links. However it shows that a lot of the links are from the same website – there’s little point in getting lots of links from the same site. If you think as a link as a vote – one website endorsing another. Having lots of links from the same site is like lots of votes from the same person – the search engines won’t place as much weight on 300 links from the same site vs 300 links from 300 different sites. Also you have quite a lot of links that are marked as ‘no follow’. These are ones that don’t pass any link juice, so don’t really count as quality links (they’re not completely worthless as they may pass you traffic, but in term of link benefit the search engines don’t count them).  My tool also tells you a mark called the Citaton Flow – this is a measure of how important and influential that page is (out of 100). So I’ve highlighted the links in yellow that are your highest performing links.

Anyway, hope all that helps! Like I say, I wouldn’t pay for training, the best way is to start reading. If you spent an entire day reading the above blogs, you’d learn an awful lot. Plus you could completely tailor what you were learning  as you would have control over what you read and searched for. I think spending £350 on a nice weekend away then a day of solid blog reading would not only be a better use of money but would also leave you more relaxed (from the weekend) and educated (from the reading)!!

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So that’s our response to questions relating to paid seminar courses. They may sometimes have their value, but in all honesty, we find the information online can be much better. We may be annoying lots of other agencies out there who regularly host SEO and link building seminars, but this is just our opinion. If you find a free one, then it could be worth attending, as they will almost always be a Q&A session where you’ll have the opportunity to ask an ‘expert’ your specific questions. And on most of these courses, paid or otherwise, you’ll normally always learn something of value, something you never knew before. But it’s just whether or not you’re willing to take a day out of your diary and £350 out of your bank account for a little tit-bit, when you can find a lot more online.

The post How Do You Learn About SEO? appeared first on www.smeketing.com.

Here are some recent blog posts discussing PPC advertising and Google Ads in more detail:

• What Are The Benefits of Google AdWords?
• Google AdWord Commonly Asked Questions: FAQs
• Top PPC/Google AdWord Mistakes You May Be Making
• Google AdWords (PPC) vs. Facebook Ads
• Top Ten Google AdWord Mistakes – Part Two
• Top Ten Google AdWord Mistakes – Part One
• Do You Have Dedicated Landing Pages for Your PPC?
• Top Tips For Landing Pages

And here is our new video! Have a watch and let us know what you think. And remember, it doesn’t cost anything to send us a quick email (info@SMEketing.com).

If you’re interested in Google AdWords and just want to find out a bit more about it, send us a quick message and we’ll get right back to you.

The post Another SMEketing Video – Our PPC (Google AdWords) Promo appeared first on www.smeketing.com.

The first (oh yes, there’ll be more!), is this kinetic typography video promoting our search engine optimization services. As you can see in the video, we’ve helped lots of companies increase the volume of high quality traffic to their website. It doesn’t matter how large or small your organisation is, SMEketing can help.

Watch the video and let us know what you think. If you want any help marketing your website, please contact us today. Email info@SMEketing.com or complete our Contact Us form today!

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The post SEO – Get Found Online; Our New Video appeared first on www.smeketing.com.

However, the benefits of Google AdWords far outweigh the steep learning curve that they require (alternatively you could outsource the creation and management of your AdWord campaigns to SMEketing!). Google  advertising is a fantastic way of building your business very quickly. Once you understand how it works, it doesn’t take too much to keep growing it and continually improving the results you see.

Although there are other forms of PPC advertising, we’ll take Google AdWords as an example as it’s one of the most popular and well established forms of PPC. When a user makes a search on Google, search results will appear in the centre of the screen and on the side. These side (and commonly top three results) are the paid (or ‘sponsored’) results. These advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their advert.

So what are the top benefits of Google AdWords?

Immediate Results

One of the key benefits of Google AdWords is that is can start driving new traffic to your website from day one. Unlike investing in SEO (which you should be doing at the same time), which can take months for good results to start showing, Google AdWords can start driving traffic to your site immediately. For new businesses or new product/services this can be a vital part in the success of failure of the launch.

Total Control Over Everything

Google AdWords is entirely customisable – you can select the keywords you want to target, what keywords you don’t want to trigger an add (such as cheap, free etc), what messaging you want in your adverts, what webpage you want to take people to and more.

You can also dictate when your adverts show – so if you only want your ad’s showing during the 9-5 working week that’s fine – you can switch off weekend and out of hours advertising.

Financial Control

One of the biggest benefits of Google AdWords is the control over how much you spend. You control how much you’re willing to pay for each click and you set a daily budget. So you’ll never spend more than you want. For your important keywords you can decide to bid as much as you can afford, and for other keywords you can lower your bid.

After a while you can start to manage your bids to really make the most of your budget. There is no minimum (or maximum) amount you can decide to spend each day.

Amazing Reports and Intelligence

Google provides an amazing amount of data relating to almost every part of your advertising campaign. In fact this is maybe one of the drawbacks for beginners – it can be a little overwhelming! But without this data you’ll never be able to understand what is and what isn’t working. The data Google gives you will help you understand the keywords that are providing the most traffic and conversions (be it sales or enquiries), what adverts generate the most clicks, what landing pages are most effective, what position generates the most clicks and more. Linked up to your Google Analytics account means that there’s very little you won’t know about your campaign.

As we said, although Google AdWords is pretty user friendly, it can be daunting for anyone who wants to embark on online advertising for the first time, or for those who don’t have time to really educate themselves about the process. For those people we offer a complete managed AdWord service. Prices range from £150 a month upwards depending on campaign size. Contact us for a custom quote today.

The post What Are The Benefits of Google AdWords? appeared first on www.smeketing.com.

So how can you increase blog subscriber and followers? We’ve listed our top five tips below:

Create engaging content on a regular basis

The content you create is obviously the most important part of any blog . Without interesting, engaging content you won’t encourage people to come back on a regular basis. And without regular content you won’t satisfy those visitors who do decide to come back again.

Ensure visitors know how to subscribe

There are a range of ways people can subscribe to your blog – the most popular options are signing up to an email newsletter or taking the RSS feed and adding it to a platform like Google Reader.

So firstly, make sure you have these facilities available to your readers.

And secondly, make it obvious and easy for people to subscribe – put your subscribe and RSS feed buttons in an easy to see place. You can also tell people at the end of your blog post to subcribe – a strong call to action along with a link can have strong impact.

Make it easy for people to subscribe

Once people see how they can subscribe, don’t make it difficult for them to do so. If they want to sign up to recieve updates via email think about what data you need from them. Do you really need their first name, surname, company, telephone, address and email? No. You just need their email address. Forcing people to complete long forms has a hugely negative effect on sign up rates.

If people don’t want to sign up to an email alert or RSS feed give them some other options. Let them know where they can find you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest or any other social site that they want to use.

Give them an incentive to subscribe

If someone knows they can just come back to your blog to read your posts, why would they give you their email address for email updates? Ask yourself “what in it for them?”. People respond very well to incentives. It doesn’t have to be a tangible product or item, it doesn’t have to be anything that costs you money. A lot of people offer free eBooks, whitepapers or member-only content as a way to encourage subscribers. Think about what your visitors would like to get as a ‘Brucie-bonus’ then give it to them.

Add trust by advertising your follower count

People are a little bit like sheep…once they know everyone is doing something, they’ll soon follow. So once you have a decent volume of followers think about advertising it. If you can say you have 2000 subscribers it gives others the feeling of trust – they’ll assume that your content must be valuable and engaging enough to keep those 2000 happy, so they may as well subscribe as well.

So, if you found this blog post interesting please feel free to subscribe for more content! All our subscription buttons are at the top of the page. Remember, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook via email newsletter or RSS.

The post How To Increase Blog Subscribers & Followers appeared first on www.smeketing.com.

There’s no set list of SEO ‘rules’ – Google have their guidelines as do the other search engines, but these are just guidelines. Many people turn to online blogs and forums for advice, and unfortunately not all that advice is best practice or up to date. If web owners make mistakes with their SEO it can at best be a waste of time, and at worst harm their site.

So what are some common mistakes we see?

Using too much flash and scripts on your website

The major search engines are much better at understanding flash now. Gone are the days where the advice was to avoid it at all costs. It can be fine to use the odd bit of flash – it can be a great way of adding an extra level of dynamism to your website and used well can look great! However you must avoid building your entire website on flash or relying on it too heavily. Search engines are still put off by too much flash, so make sure you add supporting text and graphics to the pages that have flash.

Not using the ALT attribute on images

The ALT attribute is added to images to describe their content. They used to be used to help the visually impaired understand the content and images on a website. However nowadays search engines use them to get a better understanding of your web page and the images on that page. Try to make sure you have the ALT tag on all images and try to incorporate some keywords in there too. But remember – don’t keyword stuff!! Mix it up and try to keep to one primary keyword per page. Remember to add synonyms and alternative keywords as well.

Duplication

The main SEO issue here is not really to do with taking content from other websites (which isn’t great in terms of SEO, but far worse in terms of business ethics), but more to do with duplication of your own content. You might be sat here thinking that you wouldn’t ever copy your own content – you might not, but your content management system (CMS) might.

Many websites are built using a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or DotNetNuke. These make it easy to build dynamic, flexible and modern websites. But a key issue is that they make it very easy for duplicate content to be created. For example, you might write a blog post like this, and add a few keyword tags. If you don’t then use those tags again on other blog posts, when someone searches for content using one of those tags, all they’ll find is that one blog post.

So you could have a URL that looks like www.example.com/tag/tag1 and www.example.com/tag/tag2 and www.example.com/tag/tag3 – if tag1, 2 and 3 haven’t been used elsewhere, all those three URLs will provide a duplicate page – just the one blog post that uses each of those tags… does that make sense? This is just one example of how duplicate content can easily be created on your own site without you even realising.

The reason Google doesn’t like duplicate content is because it can be viewed as cheating. Google likes large websites, with lots of fresh content. So by creating duplicate content, you are effectively growing the number of pages on your site. But these pages aren’t full of fresh, unique content. So Google assumes you’re trying to grow your site without actually adding any new content.

If you want to find out more about some of the common SEO mistakes you might be making read these posts:

• 10 Silly Search Engine Optimisation Mistakes to Avoid
• Ten More SEO Mistakes
• Top Ten SEO Tips For Small Businesses
• Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid

If you want some help managing your SEO, please get in touch with us today.

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