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…

Top 10 Blogging Tips
Here are my top 10 tips for a successful blog, there no doubt probably more but hopefully these will give you inspiration to get you started.

1. Get Inspired
There is no sense reinventing the wheel, so use assets to your advantage where you can. I don’t mean steal content here but look out for other articles or news, write your own take on the article and include a link back to the original, or write a review on something. (Helps to start a discussion.)

• Interesting articles from Newsletters & Other Blogs
• Constructive response – agree or disagree!
• Write a review
• Link to original, add additional links

2. Attend An Event
Preferably one of my Business Link Events! but attending and blogging your thoughts on it, commenting on the topic, adding your expertise. The same can be said for any seminars, workshops or meetings that are topic related to your area of business and can allow you to build your profile.

• Go to seminars, meetings, events
• Share ideas from the presentation
• Your own thoughts

3. Cheat
Well not literally cheating, but if you find other experts in your field or areas related to your subject why not sub out the work.  This certainly helps with time issues, helping you to blog regularly, and can also add additional expertise to widen the information given. Alternatively you could invite guest writers to feature on the blog demonstrating a community of experts.

• Get someone else to write it
• Outsource to Blog writers
• Guest posters

4. Write How To’s Or Lists
‘How to’ and or ‘How do I / you’ and lists are a couple of the most popular web searches, so capitalise on this and create a guide for your area of interest. Great material for showing off your expertise, adding value, and usually encouraging inbound links from other blogs and sites from experts in your industry.  Icing on the cake would be to create an accompanying video that you can post on your Youtube channel and embed into your post.

• One of the most popular searches
• How to blog or 10 top tips for blogging
• Great for generating good will
• Add video too

5. Pick A Fight
Why not become the Jeremy Clarkson of your industry? Well within reason, but being controversial, having an opinion, being passionate about your subject area, and challenging existing models gives visitors something to get excited about. One strategy might be to look at popular blogs that you disagree with on an issue and having your say. With any luck an inter blog fight will break out and visitors from this blog will visit yours to read more.

I’m not recommending you do this without thinking it through, but if you genuinely have a difference of opinion, try and exploit it professionally and constructively.

• Being controversial – Jeremy Clarkson
• Criticise popular blog
• Blogger responds (hopefully) = traffic to you!

6. Keep Them Wanting More
It’s good to create as much copy as possible, but remember what the purpose of the blog is – to gain customers! So try and think of how each post will contribute to that objective. Will it provide a link to your main site, can you offer a white paper download and collect the email address, can the post stimulate a want or need for your product or service.

You might consider releasing stages of a how to guide, so readers are looking forward to the next post. For example when I wrote the presentation on the topic, out of my Top Ten Blog Tips only 6 were included, for tips 7 – 10 attendees would have to visit here.

• Keep visitors looking forward to next post
• Drive traffic to your main site
• Capture email addresses for give aways
• Don’t give it all away on the blog

7. Cross Promote
Most optimisation professionals will agree that inbound links are a great way to achieve search engine positioning (or am I just being controversial). So why not set up a blog that you can develop as a focal point that has a different look and feel than your main site, is more engaging, is not sales-y and can be a vehicle for a community. You might consider building a strategic alliance with other non competing businesses who cater to the same target customer creating a shared blog that drives quality traffic to the alliances individual websites.

To illustrate this point here’s an example that I’ve used before, my ex colleague David Lakins now of Key Multimedia, uses this to the benefit of his clients. See the Mankymonkey surf blog ,now apart from a mention in the Page Title tag and the odd advert icon, it’s not obvious that this blog is anything other than a surfing blog. The strategy behind it are links from articles in the reviews section to the companies wetsuit shop, and other sections to its surfing kit site .Although at the moment there is not much evidence of many comments on the articles, to some extent that’s irrelevant, it works well to draw in and capture traffic and then drive it to the e-commerce sites.

• cross promote – link information to sale
• team up with non competing businesses

8. Use Visual Elements
I’ve spoken above about using video elements to brighten up posts, Youtube is the second biggest search engine in the UK next to Google, so use this to your advantage. Blog articles don’t have to be all text, look at using images where relevant. If there is something visual that the business has done, post the photos with comments, and perhaps host those on image sites such as flickr

• use video to add interest to posts
• images will brighten up boring text
• hosted images & video will provide inbound links

9. Evolve Consumers To Prosumers
A side effect of some blogs  has been to turn some customers into the businesses development team. Now businesses actively seek the interactivity, by encouraging feedback on products or services. Running articles on new developments in production you can get customer feedback quickly and can help shape the product before it reaches the launch stage. Famous example of this being Dell’s now brightly coloured laptops and laptops running Linux, all developments thanks to interaction through the companies blogs.

• seek customer involvement
• expand your product development team

10. Ask A Question
Have I forgotten anything? Are there any blog tips or tricks that I’ve missed that you find work well?

This tip features last as it really only works if you’ve got an active readership, but once you have it is a great technique for debating, encouraging opinions and giving you chance to demonstrate your knowledge. So if you would like to comment on this post feel free!

• Ask a question
• Post a problem
• Conduct a poll

Hopefully these tips will have given some inspiration to develop your own blogs, using tools like Wordpress or Blogger

If you are a South East based business please get in touch if you would like to discuss in more detail.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 © & ®

This overview has been put together in conjunction with my colleague Mark Barber one of Business Link’s innovation advisers, who has a background in product development and intellectual property.

It is meant as a guide to highlight the basic issues to be aware of, your local Business Link can help talk on an individual basis, or consult a legal professional. This post cannot be considered legal advice.

Domain name
Often overlooked but can cause problems in the future should a dispute arise over a domain name you’ve worked hard to build traffic around so check firstly that it is not an existing or refused trade mark.

You can check on the Intellectual Property Office website

Mark’s top tip here is even if registration websites say the domain name is available check with IPO, do not infringe a trademark, ignorance is no defence.

There is more general information on the Business Link site on choosing a domain name.

Who owns what?

Design
When creating a website the method of its creation & hosting will have bearing on the intellectual property ownership. If you engage a developer and they create the site for you for example, unless otherwise agreed they will own the copyright of the layout and page structures. If you are the originator and provide the content that appears on the pages, then the copyright in that is owned by you.

This is vitally important; particularly if the web developer also hosts the site, in that if you want to move the site to another host and developer in the future there could be a problem due to the copyright separately owned as mentioned above. Mark’s tip is to contract with the developer from the outset so that the copyright for the layout, pages and content are assigned to you.

If on the other hand you create the site yourself then the copyright resides exists with you.

Often websites are provided with a content management system (CRM), website developers often have their own bespoke system that they originally created. The intellectual property for that system resides with the developer, and it is unusual for this to be passed to you within a standard development contract. My tip here would be to look at an open source system such as joomla which can sometimes replace the functions of the developers own, and allow you to both develop and run the site. This should be stated in the contract.

Content
As standard copyright here will reside with the original author of the work, and if you have supplied the developer with the copy then it should be the case that you own the copyright.

If you engage a professional copywriter to do the work for you, then again make sure that there is a contract in place that will assign the copyright to you as the site owner.

If your developer is going to create the site wording, again make sure this is covered in the contract otherwise there could be a future issue.

Mark’s tip to protect content pages should carry the © Owner 2009, where the year is the first year of creation. Some prefer to include a ‘to date’ changing that each year. Neither approach is a legal requirement but good practice.

Images/Video
Again here it is back to who was the original author of the item, did your developer supply it or did you, copyright here will exist as an artistic work in photographs and images so check who owns what and if they are supplied as royalty free.

Mark’s tip contract that images supplied are royalty free, as website owner you could be ultimately responsible should the image not be bought on that basis. The owner of the image could land a hefty bill on your doorstep.

Ongoing protection
So now you’ve covered the basics and you are the proud owner of copyright on some really valuable content, how do you ensure that it’s not used elsewhere? Well there are tools to help, websites such as copyscape enable you to regularly scan for sites that have duplicated your content.

Mark’s tip is if you find your content has been duplicated a simple, non threatening letter to the site owner usually does the trick. If not pass it on to your solicitors, do not threaten.

Once you’ve created the pages take a copy of them and check them into an online safe service. This digital service tracks the file attributes into account when you check them in for proof you have not changed them. Sites such as ideasafe provide this type of service.

If you want to keep up to date with IT & Internet Law then the site at outlaw makes good reading. www.outlaw.com and also www.acid.eu.com

Thanks to Mark for his tips and hints.

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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?

As with all marketing it helps if you can profile your target customer, you may have more than one type of target customer, but the key to getting to grips with social media is being able to work out who your audience is. With a profile in mind you can then start to identify how to engage potential online communities. Business Link Advisers can help with thinking on how to profile a customer, so if you have not undertaken this exercise and want to build a marketing strategy, that may or may not include social media, I would suggest getting in touch with your local Business Link.

Armed with that essential information you should now be ready to look at the world of social media and if it can work for your business. Generally speaking there is an online community for every businesses target market somewhere. The tricky bit of course is finding it, and determining the cost benefit of engaging.

Considering the growth in social media all predictions for the future that I have seen, and many other experts are in agreement, is that social media will play an increasingly integral role in businesses marketing strategies. In an era where businesses battle to get their message heard, and customers increasingly control the adverts they let through reaching them is getting harder. Research shows that customers are more likely to trust the opinion of a friend or colleague than that of your marketing material.

So how do you go about engaging with social media? The presentation delivered by Luke Williams of Social Tech Solutions and Rich Watts of Intergage, gave some really useful tips. Luke’s structured approach is similar to the advice I give basically, Look Listen & Think (or is that how to cross the road!). A link to Luke’s social media presentation and Rich’s case study on how his company did it are both on the Intergage site for anyone who is interested.

Step 1. Look – where are my target customers having online conversations or discussions, where do they come together in a similar interest group. There is a list of social networking sites available at wikipedia, this includes information on their focus. There are also communities and interest groups/forums to consider, tip from Luke here – get a google search going with your target search term and add ‘community’ or ‘forum’ to it and look a the results, visit those sites and see if they are appropriate.

Rich’s presentation gave consideration to which tools were appropriate for the job and Intergage chose not to use Facebook. I would suggest that generally speaking if you are a Business to Consumer company then sites such as Facebook are worth creating a page for – Luke’s tip is a page not a group, and for Business to Business then its LinkedIn. Visit my LinkedIn profile for an example.

Also are any of your employees engaged in social media, forums or communities. Do they look to certain sites to get technical information or industry knowledge already. Are any of them considered experts in those fields.

Step 2. Listen – join the forums or communities, or networking sites and look at the conversations taking place. Are these relevant conversations that you can possibly add value to when you do go on to engage, are they appropriate sites. Also monitor activity on sites such as Twitter, there is a really good guide to twitter online. I set up searches for example on ‘Business Link’ and other terms, pulling those into my iGoogle page. That way I can see who is posting using the term ‘Business Link’. Visit my James Cope twitter page and also Business Link’s.

As you are listening jot down typical post frequencies popular topics or the key influencers in those communities, study their posts and learn from their style.

Step 3. Think – plan your activity, make sure the amount and content of posts are in keeping with the community, it is easy to offend and you dont want to be considered to be involved in spam as this is the quickest way to damage your brand.

Think how you will deal with negative comments people complaining online, make sure you have a strategy if you see negative entries about your company. Also what is your internal policy, most companies now have an email and internet usage policy, if you are going to encourage employees to help they should have guidelines of your corporate style, the technique to use. One of Luke’s tips consider Facebook linkage, do you want your employees Friday night activities being shown to your customers? You might consider a decision not to mix personal profiles with business contacts.

Now it’s a question of trying it, put what you have learnt about tone and content into practice and start joining in. If you’re doing it right momentum should start to build. It can take time so bear with it and measure your results using your analytics as to how much traffic that particular group or forum is sending to your site. Hopefully by now you will have made it to the other side of the road, dodging the odd car or lorry along the way.

There are loads more resources and help online and people to talk to if you need help getting there. Business Link can help find companies similar to Luke’s to who can guide & train or even manage your social media presence, or its advisers such as myself can talk you through the process above.

If you are a business based in the South East and you think you would benefit from a seminar on this topic let me know, either contact me through LinkedIn or leave a reply here.

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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:

1. Measure current visitor levels
2. Undertake search phrase/keyword research
3. Select search phrases per page
4. Check that those terms appear onsite
5. Tweak & measure

1. Measure Visitor Levels
Before you start the journey it is good to know where you are starting from! If you do not have already I would suggest getting some sort of statistics package configured to the site. A package such as Google Analytics gives key information such as the number of visitors, the sites that are referring traffic and the search terms used.

2. Undertake Keyword Research
The information that your statistics give are a great start, however they do not tell the whole story. Keyword research tools also support the process giving suggestions of alternatives that if optimised for may attract higher visitor levels than your current terms.

3. Select Search Phrases
Tip here is to consider your visitors buying process, what terms do they use to research your products/services  and how do these change when they have completed research and are looking to buy or enquire. Look at the pages of the site and determine which best support that pages theme. Try and limit to a single core phrase and perhaps two sub phrases.

4. Check Site Elements
With the phrases chosen it is now time to check that these appear in your onsite elements, the main elements I would consider would be

• meta title
• meta description
• header tags
• alt tags
• body text
• internal hyperlinks

That is not an exhaustive list but covers the basics, to get an up to date list of some of the main ranking factors visit the SEOmoz blog http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

You do not need to do this process long hand there are tools that can help, the spider simulator in the attached presentation is one. There are also software tools such as webceo and internet business promoter, both of which have free versions that give limited functionality that can be useful.

5. Tweak & Measure
Once you’ve identified the gaps in those important elements, dip into the site coding to add them in. You may or may not be able to do this as it can depend if you have created the site yourself, or the limitations of the content management system provided. If not talk to your developer about the changes and discuss how you can manage this on an ongoing basis until you are happy with the results.

Tip here is to give it some time for changes to be spotted by Google and for them to take effect. Look at the trend your statistics are showing, and don’t over tweak when you have a model that is working. Continue to build on the process bringing in offsite online activity that make the difference, turning the site from a well optimised but unvisited site to a well optimised centre of information with good traffic levels. But that’s another seminar topic!

For those that attended, I hope you found the session useful attached to this post is the Business Link Search Engine Optimisation Workshop presentation as promised.

As discussed David Lakins @ Key Multimedia has copies of the onsite and offsite search engine optimisation tip sheets

There is more help on the topic at the Business Link website which has a section on keyword selection and optimisation

Would be interested in hearing from any delegates the effect of any optimisation you undertake, or if you have any other questions please ask away.

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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.

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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.

I would suggest that the value of inbound links are crucial in the optimisation effort to ensure your site is well ranked. There are many arguments to support my belief an example of one of these is

‘There are two reasons to build links to your site.
1. Direct Traffic: Links send direct traffic to your website that could convert into leads and clients.
2. Search Engine Optimization: Links are the key to getting you ranked on the first page of the major search engines for your target keywords. This search traffic is very likely to convert into leads and clients. ‘

If you are still not convinced there is more from the source of the quote at the following article Why You Need to Build Links and What A Good One Looks Like

The subject of this post is not really to convert you to the idea of the need for inbound links but to give an idea of how this can be done. There are some basic steps that site owners can take but before you do I would encourage you to ensure you have your statistics in place so that you can measure the your success.

Step 1. Business directories & Social media – simple entries in directories are good to get, some may cost others are free. Your site statistics will begin to show which are referring traffic to you so you can decide which of those paid links are worthwhile. Social media sites may or may not provide much in terms of link score benefit but may well send visitors to you.

Step 2. Press releases and articles – there are lots of online sites you can post your press releases and place articles, pressbox.comis an example of these, remember to include a link to your site in the article. This step involves more work and of course there is no guarantee that the press releases will get picked up. If you have a blog and are writing content for that then this step should not take too much extra work. The good news if that there are experts out there you could consider contracting to deliver regular content for you. Your local Business Link can provide details of local businesses providing the service.

Step 3. Link with other websites – my tip here is not to beg, think how you would network at business event, or business meeting, can your site add value to their site visitors, and build links through a natural synergy. Of course this approach won’t work for everyone and sometimes a more aggressive strategy is needed. A tracking spreadsheet might be worthwhile keeping as you would use a contact manager, so you know who you need to follow up.

Obviously its not as simple as that, there is hard work, time and effort to put in along the way. Looking at other businesses blogs, responding to their articles to build your relationship, or networking in your local area will be the challenge here.

Another technique that some businesses adopt is the creation of multiple sites with specific content to each and use of a blog that promotes them. David Lakins @ KeyMultimedia who specialise in website promotion work, use this technique well on behalf of their client. The sites form a three way link, each building important page rank with unique content, promoting and supporting the other. Check out the following sites to see the example at work, the first site is the wet suit centre second site is the sorted surf shop and the surf related blog that serves both is interestingly named manky monkey .

If you want to try getting started there is another blog article that takes a similar view and gives more tips here on link building there is another article from the same blog which covers how not to do it which makes for a really good read how not to link build

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