Fri 24
May

Ten Digital Marketing Faux Pas

By Azam Corry in General No Comments 

Ever wanted to prove to everyone that you don’t know what’s what when it comes to Internet marketing? Here are ten things you can say that will clearly demonstrate you don’t know what you’re talking about.

The company that’s designing my website has taken care of our SEO

Ummmm…. no it has not. Website design is not the same as website optimisation. They’re not even close. Unless your web designer is on a retainer for the next year-plus, he is not taking care of your SEO.

Website optimisation is an ongoing process. First you have to work hard for months on your own site (onsite optimisation) and on other sites that are relevant to yours (offsite optimisation) to get your site to climb the search rankings. Then, once it’s in the top three, you have to continue to work hard on your own site and on others to defend its position. If your web designer does offer these services (competently), you will be getting a bill of ?1,500 to ?5,000 per month. They will not optimise your website as part of the design cost.

My customers don’t want to engage with businesses on Facebook

Wrong again. The average Facebook user likes 81 brand and product pages and if you think members of your target audience are among the billion people who currently use Facebook you should be one of the 13 million businesses that engages with them. Yes, the way you market yourself on Facebook is very different from the way you do on other platforms, but that doesn’t mean it is not important.

I’m looking for an intern to design and run my social media strategy

Then your social media strategy is going to bellyflop. Luckily for me, you are not the only person in this world who thinks a student looking for work experience knows enough about marketing to design and run a strategy. I say luckily because it is for this very reason that most businesses are not as successful as their owners would like them to be: their marketing sucks. Which only makes my clients’ great marketing strategies look even better.

I’ve written a press release. How much will you charge to send it out?

One million dollars. That’s my price. And that’s because the fact that you think I can just send out your media release to the media and your story will magically appear in the papers the next day means that you don’t know much about marketing. And that means your press release is not going to be the kind of press release that makes news headlines. In fact, it’s going to be pretty poor at best, so when I send it to the journalists in my network it’s going to annoy them and prevent them from taking my calls in future, which will jeopardise my chances of getting results for all my other clients, which will be a major threat to my business. I value that threat at one million dollars.

We’re launching a new website and we’d like some PR around it

When was the last time you read the headline “company launches website” in the FT. This is not news.

I’d like a viral video showing what my company does

What makes a video go viral? Shareability. Your standard corporate video is not shareable. It will not go viral. If you want a viral video, you need to make something that people want to share. It has to be funny, heartwrenching or utterly impressive (in a how-the-hell-did-they-do-that? way). Your corporate video should not be like that!

I would like to be in the national media every day for the month of May

Then commit a crime. And make it a big one. Or become prime minister.

I’ve found a great SEO agency and they only costs ?700 a month

You are wasting your money. SEO is an ongoing process. It’s incredibly difficult and it requires deep business insight and knowledge to build the reputation of your website. If you know anything about marketing or economics you will know that the anyone of this calibre costs ?100 an hour, and that seven hours a month will have no impact on your website.

I’ve optimised my website copy for three keywords per hundred words

Silly you. You should have optimised your website copy to gain maximum user engagement. That’ll make your visitors happy. And when your visitors are happy, Google is happy

.

Heather Baker is CEO of London B2B Digital Marketing Agency TopLine Communications.

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Wed 22
May

Top 5 Ways To Avoid The Junk Folder

By Azam Corry in eMail Marketing No Comments 

Email has a come a long way. From the dial-up AOL “You’ve got mail!” days to today’s high-speed, wireless, and mobile accessible email, there’s no denying that email has played an integral part in the advancement of the internet. It didn’t take long for businesses to realize the sheer power that email could hold in marketing their business. After all, email was quick, efficient, and most of all: free.

So began the age of email marketing. But along with that came it’s ugly and uninvited cousin: SPAM. And we’re not talking the canned and mysterious pinkish meat that almost resembles pork.

Spam is every email owner’s nightmare. Spam is what dilutes email marketing from an awesomely effective method of reaching clients and customers, to a taxing game of “Filter -Through-the-Credit-Scams-and-Enhancement-Pill-Emails”.

Luckily, email servers have gotten smarter these days and incorporate spam filters into their service. These filters let in the good emails, and keep the bad ones out. At least. That’s the idea.

Unfortunately, some email filters may be a tad too sensitive. These filters often times land good emails into the junk folder. Below are 5 simple tips to help your emails stay away from the junk folder.

  1. Avoid special characters in your subject line.

    There is NOTHING more obnoxious than seeing words surrounded by an explosion of brackets, asterisks, and tildas.

  2. Stay away from spam triggering words.

    #1! Free! 100%! Guarantee! Order NOW! Those are just few spam triggering words. When you draft your emails, ask yourself: ‘Do I sound like a sketchy car salesmen?’ or ‘Are my word choices going a little overboard?’ or simply ‘Would I, myself, honestly want to receive an email that sounds like this?’

    Chances are, if you answered “yes” to the first two questions and “no” to the last, you might have yourself a spammy email. Try your best to stay away from sales-y phrases and hot-words.

  3. Content/Image ratio is important.

    Be mindful of your images! An email composed entirely of images can likely send you to the junk folder. Make sure that if you do attach images, you have sufficient text to counteract them. More text then images is recommended.

  4. Attach a text version of your email.

    Here’s a backend hint for sending emails: have a text version available. Believe it or not, not everyone can access HTML emails. And if they don’t get HTML emails, chances are you’ll land in the spam folder.

    It’s a fact of life. The best way to combat this is to have a readable non-html version available. Don’t discriminate against non-html email recipients, they have feelings too!

  5. Only send emails to organically created lists.

    Email lists should be collected and created entirely by your business. Nevermind renting or purchasing those lists -not only will that land you in the junk folder in a heartbeat, but you’ll also be wasting your time and money. Grow your own email list by having people sign-up, subscribe, or opt-in on their own. That way, they’ll expect an email from you, and now automatically mark your message as spam.

There you have it: Five easy ways to avoid the junk folder and get your important email in the inbox, where it belongs. Email marketing by far one of the most successful marketing tools on the market. Don’t be bogged down with junk. Happy emailing!

Rona Cerillo is a mobile text campaign aficionado and marketing specialist for Trumpia, an SMS and multi-channel marketing service provider.

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Mon 20
May

Best SEO Chrome Extensions

By Azam Corry in SEO / SEM No Comments 

Whether you’re a webmaster or work for an SEO firm, it doesn’t always occur to those involved in SEO to check out Chrome extensions for helpful applications. We’ve made a list of the top five SEO extensions you should consider adding onto your Chrome browser to make life easier.

SEO for Chrome

The SEO for Chrome extension is the most widely used SEO extension on Chrome today. It provides both tools and statistics that are meant to help with SEO tasks ranging from backlink and pagerank checks to keyword research. It can also indicate to you the number of pages indexed for a particular site, and provides a variety of different stats for both social media and traffic a site receives.

The extension can also help you analyze your competition, acting as an aid to find their search traffic, PPC budget and keywords.

Majestic SEO

This extension provides a quick way to see the SEO strength of a page using its backlink information. Majestic itself crawls the entire web, so the data is original unlike some other extensions which need a third party to take data from. A summary bar tells you everything you need to know, from referring domains and URLs linking to a page of interest to Majestic’s trademark Trust and Citation flow indicators.

Users receive a broad range of information for free, including everything from link profile charts and a score for the page generated by Majestic. Link counts in this extension also go a step further by including three separate levels (ie. URL, subdomain, and root). Majestic also offers backlink detail, indicating to you the strongest backlinks to the page in elaborate detail. These characteristics, along with the anchor text analysis showing you the top 10 anchor texts on a page, make Majestic a valuable SEO extension to have.

SEO Quake

The SEO Quake extension functions as a toolbar in Chrome. It can display everything to you from Page and Alexa Rank to a plethora of other SEO parameters. The extension also works on search engine result pages (SERP). The parameters are listed by the extension, and are a combination of different indexes (i.e. Google Index, Bing Index, Alexa Rank, etc.).

SEO Site Tools

The SEO site tools extension pulls a broad scope of metrics from sources and this includes social media reactions. For example it will keep track of how many comments, shares or upvotes your content got on sites such as Facebook and Reddit. Along with expected features such as providing page ranks and providing link’s anchor texts, it highlights nofollow links as well. It uses similar parameters as other extensions such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It even uses data from Majestic SEO. This extension is desirable especially to those who keep track of their social media outlets.

Mozbar

Mozbar offers similar features as most other extensions, but there are a few features that make it stand out. It allows for metric comparison between for a particular search engine (i.e. Google etc.) with the SERP overlay. It also provides for custom searches based off where your location. The extension also offer’s Mozbar’s personal rankings (mozRank) as well as how trusted the site and domain is (mozTrust).

It also offers features for page analysis. Elements include everything from the country and IP address to title or header tags and meta-descriptions. It also offers an SRP overlay that allows for evaluation of all the hits in a SERP.

Ricardo Casas is the CEO of Fahrenheit Marketing in Austin, Texas. Fahrenheit marketing offer a wide range of marketing services from web development and SEO to online PR, phone tracking and social media marketing.

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Fri 17
May

5 Reasons Why Video Marketing Trumps Articles

By Azam Corry in Content Writing & Marketing No Comments 

When you’re starting an online business it can be difficult to find customers. With unlimited funds no doubt you could bring millions of people back to your site, but as that’s not the case, you need to use what you have effectively. If you have done any research you’ve probably heard about content marketing because it’s taking over the online world. The idea is to produce amazing content and share it all over the web in the hope it will draw people into your sales funnel.

People usually associate content marketing with written articles, but you don’t need to write anything if you don’t want to. You might even find that you get better results creating videos. You can still create the quality content people are looking for and once you show people you know what you’re talking about you will end up making a lot more sales. We’re going to have a closer look at why video marketing might be better than article marketing and you might decide it’s right for you.

Reveal The Emotion

It’s almost impossible to show any emotion in an article unless you’re a great writer. If you do happen to become all emotional it still doesn’t guarantee you’re conveying the right message. When your face is on camera it’s completely different. People will be watching you closely and they will know exactly how you feel. You can even start swinging your arms in the air like a mad person, but when you write an article they will never get to see your true feelings.

Save Money

I’m pretty sure you’ve heard someone say that time is money. In business it’s true and if you spend hours writing an article it will stop you from doing other things. You then have to edit it yourself and it will waste even more of your time, or you will need to get someone to edit it for you and it will waste theirs. When you shoot a video it will be over and done with much quicker as long as you don’t need to do it a hundred times until it’s perfect.

Attract More People

Some people won’t want to waste their time reading long articles, but they will happily watch a video because they can be doing other things at the same time. They can watch it while they eat lunch and they don’t have to keep scrolling down the page. You can also go places a written article can’t take you. Think about how popular YouTube is at the moment. You can reach out to people on the second biggest search engine in the world and attract them back to your site.

You Become Their Friend

If someone reads an article on your site they won’t even care who wrote it. Nobody will know who you are, even if they thought the article was brilliant. When they watch you on video they will get to know you as a person. They will like you a lot more, but even if they don’t think you’re the greatest person in the world they might still trust you because you seem genuine. They won’t think that when they read a thousand words on a page.

Over Your Shoulder Action

If you are teaching someone how to do something a video reigns supreme. It’s hard showing someone how to do something in written form. When you shoot a video they can see exactly what you do and copy it step by step. If they don’t understand at the first time of asking they can watch the video again and look at what you do. If it’s an article it’s much harder to find the answer to something they don’t have a clue about.

Test And See

You don’t have to commit yourself to video marketing forever. You only need to give it a try and you will be able to tell whether it’s something you should be doing more of. I’m sure you will love the results you get and your company can move forward, so what are you waiting for?

Well known entrepreneur Phil Raymonds has listed the pros and cons of video marketing in business on his blog. For more information visit his facebook page.

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