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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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.

Anyone can easily set up their own blog nowadays – free blogging sites like Blogger and WordPress make it easy to create good looking, functional blogs. The introduction of AdSense from Google in 2003 provided bloggers with a form on income but have also made it far more competitive.

So, what does it take to become a successful blogger?

Setting Your Objectives
You must understand why you are blogging in the first place – what are you going to write about and who is your target audience. Some of the most successful blogger (such as Darren Rowse from Digital Photography School and Perez Hilton) have a very particular audience that they write for. People looking for fantastic photography tips will know to go to Darren’s blog, whereas someone looking for the latest gossip on Brad Pitt would go to Perez.

Know Who Your Readers Are
What are your readers expecting? And are you giving it to them? Readers want more than just an essay on a topic – they want personal opinions, humour, good writing, something unique and useful. A good way of finding out what your readers want is to monitor and reply to any comment that you get.

Effective Blog Design
The design of your blog is an extremely important part of blogging. A professional looking design is necessary if you want to instil a sense of trust to your readers and convince them that your blog is a quality blog that they should spend time reading. Your choice of template/design should reflect the content of your blog – if you’re blogging about photographs, you shouldn’t have a blog template covered in images of lipsticks and pretty pink things (which would be suitable for a blog on beauty products).

Use Of Appropriate Images
Images are vital in blogs, as they say ’a picture is worth a thousand words’, You need to ensure that you select appropriate images that match your blog post – these can be pictures, graphs, illustrations or screenshots.

Writing Style
You might find that you end up typing blog posts very quickly – if it’s a subject you’re passionate about you’ll find that your fingers might not be able to type quick enough! This is great, but it’s important to go back and check your posts before you publish. Blogs can often be more relaxed in their tone, but readers still expect a piece of well structured writing with good spelling and grammar.

Functionality and Optimisation
Optimising your blog so that it can perform well in the search engines is important if you want to pick up traffic from this medium. Make sure your blog can be indexed by the major search engines and that it has good architecture and navigation. However, a well designed blog, with unique, useful content will more than likely do well in the search engines naturally. Content is king, and blogs are an excellent way of hosting a large amount of high quality content. Keeping the optimisation of your blog in the back of your mind can’t hurt though – ensuring you’ve got good internal linking, title tags other on-page optimisation ticked off can only help you do even better in the search engines.

If you’d like any help blogging in 2011, get in touch with us today – call 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com

So imagine you have a new offer – promoting 50% of a particular product – what can you do to push this promotion online?

• Create special offer page
  • Explain what the offer is
  • What are the benefits?
  • What are exactly are you offering – what can your customers expect to receive?
  • What is the cost? (free, percentage off, pounds off etc)
  • How to order?
  • Include form on the page to register

Then promote this page using various online platforms:

• If you are using Google AdWords or any other form of pay per click advertising, create a special campaign with dedicated adverts pointing to your promotion web page.
• Create a press release about your offer
  • Upload it to online newswires
  • Might be worth paying £45 or so to put it on a paid newswire
  • Email it to industry journalists and publications (both online and physical)
• Promote on all social media sites
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
• Create a blog post about it
  • Link to the main landing page
• Create an article about it
  • The benefits of your offer and how it can help your customers
• Create an email about it and blast it out to your email marketing list
  • For previous prospects that maybe didn’t convert in the past, try writing a personalised sales letter to the contact and posting it (old school, but still a good-un!). Explain what the offer is and include a link to the page for people to register for it, and a paper form which they can fax/scan/email back.
• Add it to your email signature
• Maybe consider buying some banner ads on relevant event marketing websites
• When you sell one, try and get a customer testimonial which you can add to the promotional page (and other marketing materials)
• See if you can get existing customers to spread the word to their customers/partners etc

So you see, that with a bit of time and effort there really are very effective methods you can use to promote your latest offer.

If you need any help with any of these areas (creating landing pages, Google AdWords, press releases, blogging or article writing), get in touch with us today. We’re passionate about creating optimised content and have helped many of our customers get fantastic results using such methods.

Call 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com

This has happened to a few of our clients, and over time we’ve put together a pretty strong case for a blog. The below is a summary of the business case we would present to someone who is a bit hesitant about blogs:

Why Should You Start Blogging?

• It will allow you to engage in an open dialogue and exchange of ideas with customers and potential customers
• It will establish trust and build relationship with prospects
• It shows you as an expert and builds authority
• It will provide added value to the people that visit your site
• It will show that you’re up to date on current trends within the industry
• By giving away advice and education it will engender gratitude and loyalty from your followers – which will either be existing customers, or prospects
• It will have a huge beneficial impact on the search rankings of your website
  • Building relevant traffic
  • Increase ranks in major search engines
• It will give you greater brand visibility and can be used as a PR tool
• It gives a more personal face to the business – if you pride yourself on the quality of your employees, why not show them off via the blog

What are the Drawbacks?

• Managing and maintaining a blog takes an investment of time.

How Should You Manage Your Blog?

• Ideally a new post should be published at least once a week without fail.
• To help spread out the responsibility, you could have a different department being responsible for creating a blog post each week. This also helps to make the blog more well rounded; you don’t want it to appear like it’s constantly managed by a ‘marketing droid’, but by real employees with real relevant skills. It will also give an added depth to the blog. For example, if you are an IT firm, some posts could be quite techie which will please the IT/techie customers and prospects reading, others will be more support based which may be of interest to the end users of solutions, others will be sales which will be of interest to the decision makers and people responsible for purchasing  your solutions. There needs to be different type posts from different people to target every type of reader and for the blog to be well rounded
• You should have one person overseeing the blog, who can provide subjects ideas for each post and an outline of how the post can be written
• There should be no strict guidelines to post length – some can be short and to the point, others can be more in depth
• It’s a good idea to create a library of pre-prepared posts that can be published at anytime, allowing a level of flexibility
• You need one person who will be responsible for the maintenance and management of the blog – this will include monitoring and responding to all comments, as well as promoting each blog post using various marketing methods
• You can use free blogging platforms such as WordPress, and ideally have it hosted on your own domain

Another surefire way to convince management that a blog is the way forward is to do a bit of competitor research. If your key competitors are blogging, then you definitely should be too. And if they’re not, you can be the pioneer, leading the way and getting a nice headstart on them.

If you need help setting up a blog, or want someone to write optimised blog posts for you on a regular basis, please get in touch with us on 023 8083 7271 or info@SMEketing.com.

Guest blogging is where you invite someone to create a blog post for your blog. There are many benefits to both blog owner and guest blogger:

Benefits of Guest Blogging for the Guest Blogger:

• Free publicity for your business
• High quality link back to your website
• Benefit of reaching a new audience
• Improves your reputation
• Future recipriocation

Benefits of Guest Blogging for the Blog Owner:

• Enables a fresh point of view and style of writing to your blog
• New opinion from a respected industry member
• A day off from writing blog posts yourself!

So SMEketing are kick starting the guest blogging here and now with this offer: if you are a small business that has experienced success with online marketing such as social media, SEO, online advertising, or success in more traditional marketing, such as events and print advertising, get in touch. We would love to hear from you and print your story on our blog.

If you’re interested, send us an email at info@SMEketing.com.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

It used to always be about interruption marketing – adverts interrupting your favourite TV show, every other page in a magazine being an advert, adverts on the radio offering car insurance and local double glazing, pop ups jumping up from websites running around the page whilst you try to find the X to close it down…. you get what I mean. Marketing was all about interruption – getting in the consumers way. Did we ask for Coronation Street to be split into two halves with 3 minutes of adverts in the middle? No we didn’t. Luckily nowadays, we don’t have to put up with it anymore. We can fast forward through adverts on TV, install spam blockers and pop up blockers to get rid of those pop ups and spam emails. No longer do we have no choice over having to endure irrelevant marketing rot.

So marketers need to change the way they promote their products and services. One popular stream of thought is all about content – providing content to consumers when they want, where they want. If a young lady is online, if searching in Google for ‘red ladies bikes’ then you need to make sure that your bike website gets found in Google for that search term. That young lady may also go on Twitter, and say that ‘I’m looking for a new bike – it’s got to be red, can anyone recommend a shop?’ – again, you need to make sure you are there to answer that tweet.

Additionally, people now use the Internet to research purchases. They don’t go to Comet and ask the spotty teenager behind the till for advice, they go online and look at reviews from people who are just like them, who have bought the same printer, used it and have now formed an opinion; an opinion which they post online which is available for the whole world to see.  Even my Granny, who doesn’t even have the Internet knows that online is the best place to get product advice – when she wanted a new DVD player earlier this year she called me up and asked me to go online and check the reviews of the one she wanted!  The power of a positive review in Amazon is amazing – in the same way that a bad review can be disastrous. So businesses need to also monitor social media; know what is being said about products you sell, your industry, and more importantly – you!

These are just a couple of examples, but eConsultancy have some social media statistics to really bring home the fact that your small business NEEDS to be participating in social media marketing – if you’re not, you’re in danger of become an irrelevant dinosaur:

• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the Internet is on social media sites.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.*
• 80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
• Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people… In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
• Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopedia.
• The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
• It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
• The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
• According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
• The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
• Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
• Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
• Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.

*Thanks to SEW for the b/g inspiration.

So social media is here to stay. If you don’t have a blog on your site, aren’t using Twitter, and don’t have a Facebook Business Page then please come and talk to us at SMEketing.  For the month of November, we are offering you the chance to have a Facebook Business Page created for just £60 – get one before the offer runs out!

So what’s the second reason blogs are brilliant for small business search engine optimisation? Keywords. If you are writing a blog post about your products or services, you will naturally include a number of keywords which are the terms prospects use to search with.

Not only will your blog posts contain your all important keywords, but they’ll also probably include a host of variations on these keywords – plurals and synonyms are almost as important as the original keyword in the first place. An addition to your keywords, you’ll be using keyphrases – these are often known as the ‘long tail’. These are longer phrases that people may use to locate what they are searching for on the web. An example of this search would be: “how can I clean paintbrushes without damaging them?”, this is a typical example of a longer search query that a searcher may enter into Google. If you have written a well rounded blog post on your easy to clean paint brushes, there is a good chance that you will match this long tail search term, and your blog post will rank high in the search engine results.

A well written blog post will be focused, with keywords naturally occurring in the title, headers and body section. There are many schools of thought on keyword use, but all agree that in order to rank for your desired keyphrases, you need to include them in certain aspects of your website copy. The recommended ratio of keyword to text is about 5-10%. Don’t go over 10% as this may appear like you are ‘keyword stuffing’; a very old technique which only serves to get your site penalised by the search engines.

Because your blog post will be focused on a specific area, this, combined with the fact that it is new and unique content, means that Google and the other search engines will rank your blog post higher in the search results for the keyterms used in that post than possibly static pages  of your competitors. Getting people to your site via your blog is a great way to drive an increase in relevant traffic, and if you provide high quality content with strong call to actions, people will contact you/make a purchase/or whatever other result you are looking for.

If you’re still unsure whether a blog is right for your small business, call us on 023 8083 7271, and we’ll be more than happy to try and convince you! Or, if you know that a blog will help your small business website (which it will), get in touch and we can help create it for you.

Let us know of any other reasons why you think a blog makes a great tool for any small business – leave your comments below, we love reading them!

They have so many benefits, especially in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO). This weeks post will focus on just one of the benefits (come back next week for the next benefit):

Benefit Number 1: Google LOVES Fresh Content
Google, and the other search engines love fresh content; same as humans, we don’t want to read out of date content, and neither do the search engines (not that they actually ‘read’ the content, but they don’t want to present old content to searchers). Because of this, Google will prioritise fresh content over old content in their results. So imagine you have recently created a blog post all about the benefits of your product – such as your particular brand of easy clean paint brushes. When someone searches for ‘easy to clean paint brushes’ in Google, there’s a good chance that your blog post on your super easy to clean paint brushes will show up high in the search results. Your result is likely to be higher than some of your competitors who just have a product page featuring their brushes, that they’ve not updated in six or more months. In terms of search engine optimisation, you must remember that search engines don’t rank websites, they rank pages – and they love brand spanking new pages! Having a site with regularly updated content and regular new pages also means that overall your site gets more ‘trust’ from the search engines. So some of the benefit from the new content will roll over to other pages as well, even if they haven’t been updated in a while.

Another benefit of adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis is that the search engine bots will crawl your site on a more regular basis – meaning that any crucial updates you’ve made to your site/content will be refreshed in the search engine results a lot quicker. Have you ever wondered what the ‘cached’ link means when you look at search results in Google? Clicking on this will show you the last time Google crawled that web page – so you can see exactly what Google is seeing. If you have updated your website with some new product pages, Google will not know about it until the next time it comes to crawl your site. So if you hardly ever update your site, Google will be in the habbit of only crawling your site on a monthly (or so) basis. This means that none of your new product pages will appear in the search engines results during this month – not until Google crawls your site again. However, if you constantly add new content to your site, Google will get into the habbit of crawling your site a lot more often – the ideal crawl amount is daily, but realistically, weekly will do. Having your site crawled on a regular basis, means your brand new product pages will show up in the search engine results a lot quicker.

So we’ve established that the search engines love fresh new content. However, it can be difficult to continually add new content to your site - you don’t to be adding pointless pages to your site just for the sake of it – this is where blogs come in. Each time you add a new blog post, that creates new content and a new page on your site. Ensuring that you update your blog at least once a week means that the search engines will start to crawl your site on a regular basis and will start to prioritise your new pages (and pages in your site in general) in their results.

Come back next week for ‘Benefit Number 2′.

In the meantime, if you want any assistance creating a blog for your small business, please come and talk to us here at SMEketing. Not only can we create blogs for you, we can also write and optimise your blog posts! Click here to contact us.

1. Blogging: Setting up a blog can be completely free! Yes, we love anything free. But like most freebies, in order for it to be effective you need to plan it well and invest your time into it. Using free blog providers like WordPress and Google Blogger are great ways of getting involved in the blogging world, without costing you a penny. There are so many different benefits of blogging, one of the biggest benefits is to your websites ranking in the search engines (aka Search Engine Optimisation - SEO): Google loves new and unique content. Blogging is a great way to constantly add new content to your site. Plus your posts will be tagged and full of relevant keyword. Blog well and others in your industry may link to you, increasing the number of valuable inbound links. For more on the benefits of blogging, read this post: Blogging – just for teenagers, or good for your small business?

2. Twitter: Again, another freebie! Twitter is great for promoting what you do and learning about latest industry trends. By joining the conversation and providing useful information, you will soon generate a loyal base of followers. Use Twitter to answer questions relevant to your industry, learn about new goings on, promote your product, events and news (but don’t be pushy). For more information on using Twitter to promote your small business, read these blog posts: Twitter: Small Business Success Stories – Will yours be one of them? and Guide to Getting Your Small Business Started on Twitter

3. Email Marketing: Email marketing can cost as little as 1p per recipient and £5 per mailshot (well, those are the rates for using a self managed SMEketing Email Marketing solution, but we like to think these are pretty competitive!). If you don’t have time to maintain a close working relationship with your customer base, email marketing is a great, cost effective way of keeping them updated with your latest news, products and offers. Email marketing can also be used as a lead generation tool. Send out well targeted mailshots to relevant recipients and you will find visits to your web site go up, and conversion rates increase. For more information on the benefits of email marketing read this blog post: Email Marketing for Small Businesses

4. Google AdWords: These unfortunately are not free (we wish!), but you completely control your budget. If you only have £10 a day to spend, that’s fine! Make sure you get the most from your budget by using relevant keywords, focused adverts with a strong call to action, and a well thought-through landing page. Google AdWords can be a great way of driving relevant traffic to your site, and the results are completely measurable. If something isn’t working, you know straight away. This is why AdWords are one of the most cost effective advertising mediums out there. Add Conversion Tracking to your adverts and you’ll be able to see exactly what ad’s are providing the highest conversion rate once visitors are on your site. Once you know that, you can direct your budget to keywords and adverts that are giving you the highest Return on Investment (ROI).

5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):You know I said Google AdWords weren’t free, well there is a way that you can get Google to promote your site FOR FREE! How? Improve your website’s ranking for relevant keywords, and Google will display your site in their search results – free of charge! But again, this is something that will take an investment in your time. Make sure your website is well designed – good navigation, lots of keyword rich content, no broken links, good use of anchor text in your links, etc… Once that is done, you need to boost the number of high quality inbound links. Go to Yahoo and type “linkdomain:yourcompany.com -site:yourcompany.com” to see the number of your inbound links. Do the same for your competitors and see how you compare. Next create a plan to increase the number of incoming links – sign up to relevant directories, promote your blog, create great content on your site that people want to link to. Links should be from high quality sites – link farms are NOT GOOD! The page giving you a link should have few other outgoing links on the same page, and the anchor text should be optimised to promote what you do, not necessarily your business name. An example of a good link to SMEketing would be: “SMEketing is a fantastic source for small business marketing advice and services.” The anchor text here tells Google that the link (www.SMEketing.com) is relevant to “small business marketing”. If the anchor text fell on the business name, it would just tell Google that “SMEketing” is relevant to www.SMEketing.com – which to be fair, it probably had figured out anyway!
Read here for more SEO tips: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid

If you want to learn more about any of the above marketing strategies, please get in touch. At SMEketing we’re experienced in all these marketing mediums and have seen first hand the benefits when small businesses employ such tactics.