Posted on 22 October 2009 by jamescope
I was recently asked to put together a quick presentation on blogging tips for businesses, and thought it might be useful to share my Top 10 Tips for sucessful blogging here.
Why Blog?
To start with perhaps I should cover why should you bother! Well in my opinion Blogs are a great way to engage with visitors who are interested in your subject area, to build your brand, and hopefully convert them to customers at some point.
I started this blog as a way to keep businesses I meet up to date with latest developments. I often will meet business owners only once or twice, but throughout the year there is information that they could benefit from, previously I would have been unable to communicate those.
My top reasons for blogging therefore:
- Quality Content – Inbound Links & Search Engine Love
- Build Reputation – Share Knowledge & Expertise
- Convert Visitors – Garners Trust
- Engage Customers – Product / Service Feedback
That said arguably blogging is not for everyone, if you identify with these reasons more than the above, don’t start, consider outsourcing it:
- You’re Bored – Will you add real value
- It’s all Sell Sell Sell – Will turn people off, damage brand
- Website News is Old – No time?
Hopefully the potential benefits outweigh the extra effort, but if you are in doubt if blogging might work as a route to market get in touch and we can talk the issues through. For those that are here are my top tips…
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Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »
Posted on 15 October 2009 by jamescope
With the latest industrial action causing issues in some parts of the UK and more potential disruption to follow, ecommerce website owners should be getting ready for the postal strike. My advice would be:
Make new customers aware – place a notice on your site if this is likely to effect delivery
Keep existing customers informed – if current orders placed are effected let them know
Consider alternative couriers – remember to keep an eye on your calculated postage fees
There is more information on the Business Link site on how the strike could impact on your business
Posted in ecommerce | 1 Comment »
Posted on 13 October 2009 by jamescope
It has been accepted for some time now, that you get approximately 3-10 seconds to convince a visitor to your site that this is the site for them. Website owners often spend a lot of time thinking through where they think elements should go that will attract interest, agonising if a core product and call to action should be placed in the centre or right of the screen for example.
Business Link’s conversion seminars earlier this year looked at software that helped with that thinking process, by highlighting areas of the site that attracted the most heat or clicks. The following links might be useful if you are looking for examples.
Crazy Egg (heatmaps)
Click Density (more heatmaps)
Click Tale (visitor recording & hover maps)
Google Website Optimiser (split testing software)
Those of you that made it to the sessions will remember Adrian and his presentation, he has subsequently found a handy website that you can upload a jpg screen shot of your site to and it will generate an estimated heatmap for you for free. Perfect for those that want a quick check to see if the site elements are likely to draw visitors attention. Visit the Feng-GUI site to try it out. Would be interested to hear any of your feedback from using it.
We recorded those sessions and the upload is nearly ready, will blog as soon as ready for anyone who is interested in recapping. In the meantime if you need any of the links to the tools discussed please shout.
Posted in Web Design | No Comments »
Posted on 6 October 2009 by jamescope
In a slight departure from our normal website topic based seminars, in our November seminar series we will be taking a look at online and remote working technologies to benefit your business.
Technology has now enabled businesses to be available and “on-line” 24/7, enabling rich context communication via web cams, video phones, Skype, broadband and virtual interactive environments. The advantages of using such technologies; reduced travel, quicker response times, environmental benefits and fewer missed opportunities, are many and significant. However, to harness such potential benefits requires careful planning and management — unless of course you want them to manage you!
The seminars will be a good catch up for those thinking about using Skype for their business, and there should be a show case of gadgets available on the day also.
As usual various dates around the South East starting in November, visit our Innovation Events page for more details or to book.
Posted in Seminars & Events | No Comments »
Posted on 1 October 2009 by jamescope
Back in June I covered the importance of capturing location based traffic searches for businesses that operate geopgraphically. Local search is still important but with the appearance of Bing and predicted increase in search market share, I would suggest including this in your strategy.
The basics are the same, think about where your customers are and monitor your site statistics to determine which location areas you wish to optimise against and include those in the meta and site content. Just as you would include a Google local business entry, complete similar for Bing Local Listing Centre.
Bing has a supplemental website area to the listing, which can be used for link to subpages, a hotel for example might link to tripadvisor ratings, online booking page, or seasonal offers.
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
Posted on 10 September 2009 by jamescope
One of my earlier posts covered website copywriting, how to craft your pages to achieve objectives. As more and more websites aim to become a knowledge base or expert in their field, protecting a sites copy is becoming more and more crucial. This post covers the issues behind copyright & intellecutal property (IP) for websites, how to protect your online copy and the intellectual property that goes into a website. Looking at elements such as:
- Domain name
- Content
- Images
- Use of © & ®
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Posted in Web Design | No Comments »
Posted on 4 September 2009 by jamescope
Social media has been on the radar for businesses for sometime now, now adoption and use of the media as a marketing tool is on the increase. Many businesses struggle with how this can benefit them and ultimately lead to increased traffic or sales. I was kindly invited to attend a really useful seminar yesterday which was primarily to add value for clients of a local developer Intergage, the session had some great tips which are the inspiration for this post on social media – get involved & increase traffic.
If you are struggling with questions such as those below this post will hopefully give you a starting point
- what is social media?
- should I be on Facebook?
- what on earth is twitter?
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Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »
Posted on 27 August 2009 by jamescope
Tonight I will be running a search engine check workshop for delegates at Business Link’s open evening in Fareham.
The session is aimed at giving attendees the tools and techniques to be able to perform a basic search engine assessment of their website. For search engine success it is widely accepted that onsite optimisation accounts for only around 20% of the activity required, with the other 80% contributed by offsite online activity.
With that in mind to assess your onsite optimisation follow these basic steps:
- Measure current visitor levels
- Undertake search phrase/keyword research
- Select search phrases per page
- Check that those terms appear onsite
- Tweak & measure
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Tags: search engine optimisation workshop
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
Posted on 13 August 2009 by jamescope
Our Business Link email marketing and website conversion seminars are now in full swing, and early feedback from attendees is showing that it is a really valuable event.
The first session covers email marketing and how small and medium businesses can use it to drive new and repeat business back to the site to make it a success. The old marketing rule of 80% of your sales coming from 20% of you customers can be realised by using email marketing, moving away from the constant need to attract new customers to a greater emphasis on increasing spend from your exisiting customers.
By profiling your database to identify your best and worst customers you can use considered and targeted campaigns to reward those that are more likely to buy and become better long term customers than those that will take the special offer and run. Seth Godin, who is world reknown says ‘Focus on share of customer, not market share – fire 70% of your customers and watch your profits go up!’. While im not suggesting you do that, I would suggest looking at your database, profiling your best customers and use email marketing to target them.
There is some useful information on the newzapp website on how to conduct B2B email marketing campaigns, but the lessons also translate equally to B2C.
If you’ve not yet attended one of the seminars there are some places left at some of the venues however dates are running out, book your place at the Business Link website .If you do not manage to make it to one of these, we will be podcasting them and will have an online seminar version for you to be able to catch up on. I will post details as soon as we have it produced.
Tags: business link, email marketing, website conversion rate
Posted in Emarketing | No Comments »
Posted on 10 July 2009 by admin
I often talk to businesses about how they spend lots of time and money optimising their website but they still struggle to get good search engine rankings. After we have looked at their onsite optimisation elements I usually ask the question ‘what’s your inbound link strategy?’
Usually businesses are plagued with calls from perhaps less reputable companies offering to get them onto page one by building links for £200-£400 pcm without any thought for relevancy. Some website owners have built their own thought through plan, however more often than not it is an area that is overlooked and unclear as to the approach to take.
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Tags: inbound links, Search Engine Optimisation
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, Small Business, Website & eBusiness, business link | No Comments »
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