Web Vitality

Merry Christmas from Web Vitality

Steph — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 10:49:02 +0000

It’s been a fantastic year for Web Vitality and the superheroes and seeing as it’s Christmas eve and we’re all in good spirits we would like to wish all clients and Web Vitality enthusiasts a fantastic Christmas and New Year!

It’s been a turbulent year for us internet marketers in general, we’ve fought Pandas and Penguins alike but now it’s time for the Superheroes to pack up our tools and focus our attentions on two entirely differently characters: The Snowman and the Snowdog (yes we’re ecstatic at a new Snowman film!).

Here at Web Vitality we’ve had quite a year! We’ve taken on three lively superheroes in 2012, all of whom have brought new powers to the table which have helped us grow even further. We have also relocated to pastures new to accommodate our new troops, but possibly the most exciting aspect was us all getting new, larger desks!

Now we’re closing up for the year and enjoying Christmas and New Year with families, friends, good food and drink and are back in action on the 7^th January 2013. Have a brilliant Christmas and New Year everyone!

IIIT’SSS CHRIIIISSSSTTTMASSSS!

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PPC SPECIALIST WANTED

Mark Farrell — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:39:26 +0000

Web Vitality are looking for an enthusiastic and experienced PPC advertising professional to join our expanding team. You’ll have the opportunity to work with a great team, and develop your digital marketing knowledge within the experienced online marketing team at Web Vitality.

The right candidate must be a self-starting individual, with strong organisational and written skills. You must have a proven background in PPC, Affiliate Management, a passion for the PPC industry, and be committed to keeping up to date with industry news, trends and best practices.

MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES WILL INCLUDE:

PPC strategy and planning
Account creation and management
Keyword Research
Advert Testing and Optimisation
Remarketing
Affiliate Program Management
Maintaining client relationships
Producing client reports
Collaboratively working with the online marketing team

SKILLS REQUIRED:

Knowledge of Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter platforms
Working knowledge of Google Adwords Editor
Familiarity with Affiliate Window
Strong organisational and time-keeping skills
Strong written and communication skills (inc. telephone manner)
Strong research and analysis skills
Familiarity with Microsoft Office (Excel, etc)
Experience with Google Analytics / web analytics packages

BENEFICIAL SKILLS FOR THE ROLE INCLUDE:

Sales/new business experience
Google Adwords Certified Individual
Conversion Rate Optimisation experience

What you will get in return:

21 days holiday per year (plus. bank holidays, Christmas eve and New Year’s eve)
Support with career development (inc. budget for SEO conferences and training)
Relaxed working environment
City Centre Loft working environment

We have a few retro games consoles also that we could do with new champions for.

Competative salary dependent on experience.

To apply for this role, please send your CV and covering letter to info@webvitality.co.uk

STRICTLY NO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES AS WILL OFFEND IF CALL

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SENIOR SEO CONSULTANT ROLE

Mark Farrell — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:36:33 +0000

Web Vitality are looking for an enthusiastic candidate to fill the role of senior SEO consultant within our ever growing team. You’ll have the opportunity to work with an interesting client base within a friendly young agency, and develop your digital marketing knowledge within the experienced online marketing team at Web Vitality.

The right candidate must be a self-starting individual, with strong organisational and written skills. You must have a proven background in SEO, a passion for the SEO industry, and be committed to keeping up to date with industry news, trends and best practices.

Main responsibilities will include:

SEO strategy and planning
Technical SEO analysis
On-page optimisation
Off-site strategies and implementation (link building)
Keyword research and website architecture
Running and assisting full SEO campaigns
Maintaining client relationships
Producing client reports
Collaboratively working with the online marketing team

Required skills:

Thorough understanding of SEO (both on-page and off-page)
Knowledge of other marketing activities that impact SEO performance
Strong organisational and time-keeping skills
Strong written and communication skills (inc. telephone manner)
Strong research and analysis skills
Familiarity with Microsoft Office (Excel, etc)
Experience with Google Analytics / web analytics packages

Beneficial skills for the role include:

Web development experience (HTML, etc)
Sales/new business experience

What you will get in return:

21 days holiday per year (plus. bank holidays, Christmas eve and New Year’s eve)
Support with career development (inc. budget for SEO conferences and training)
Relaxed working environment
City Centre Loft working environment

We have a few retro games consoles also that we could do with new champions for.

Competative salary dependent on experience.

To apply for this role, please send your CV and covering letter to info@webvitality.co.uk

STRICTLY NO RECRUITMENT AGENCIES AS WILL OFFEND IF CALL

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Google’s New Disavow Tool

Mark Farrell — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:13:27 +0000

Not wanting to miss out on the party I thought I would jot my thoughts down about the new Google Disavow tool.

Since the Penguin update link profiles have come under the spotlight quite a lot. Webmaster Tools have been issuing unnatural link warnings and people have generally been in a panic over the whole thing for a while now.

My stance on it is, that if you haven’t got the spammy links in the first place then you won’t have been affected. That said, there are people affected and here are my thoughts.

What Is the Google Disavow Tool?

Not wanting to go down the same route as every other blog post I have read today which has pretty much just repeated what Search Engine Land and our old friend Matt Cutts have said, I will explain it quickly.

The general consensus after the Penguin update was to remove all bad links from your website. People have been scrambling around trying to get links removed with I’m guessing not much success for the majority. Google has now developed a tool within Webmaster Tools so that you can tell Google which links to ignore.

When I first heard about it I thought it was a really good idea until I started to really think about it. If this tool does exactly what it says on the tin then it could potentially cause a lot of damage to the web.

Past Users Hurting Your Website

This one was suggested by Jamie my Web Marketing Manager and is genius if you are UN ethical. How many Webmaster Tools accounts do people still have access to that they shouldn’t? Think of all of the companies who have used SEO agencies in the past and then have forgotten to remove them from their Webmaster Tools account.

These old SEO companies could quite easily jump into Webmaster Tools and submit a Disavow file and basically kill all your links instantly – especially if they are now working for one of your direct competitors.

Making It Available To Non Power Users

Matt Cutts says in his video that this tool is for power users only. If he thinks for one second that that warning will stop your average user he is sadly misguided. What will happen then is that people will start Disavowing all over the show.

A lot of people will not know a good link from a bad link so could be killing a perfectly good link. If a few people do this then that link will no longer count so anybody out there who has a link from a disavowed site will inadvertently be affected also.

To really stop this happening Google should just say “hey guys these are your bad links kill them” They won’t say that because they don’t know themselves and are hoping the actions of users will help to highlight bad links.

Negative SEO

Google keeps saying that Negative SEO is hard work yet they have just provided a tool for anybody wishing to attack a site to use. How many black hat companies out there have thousands of websites with thousands of webmaster tool accounts that could pick on one site and pretty much kill it over night?

Negative SEO is worrying enough so by providing this tool they are just opening the flood gates to a whole other industry.

SEO Debate

There has also been a lot of talk within the SEO community about these unnatural link warnings in that, some people believe that these warnings are nothing more than a way for Google’s Spam team to find out which sites people believe to be bad.

When they get a reasonable number of people suggesting a site they then manually penalise those sites thus affecting anybody else who has links from them. It’s a very clever way of detecting sites if you ask me.

Have people been ignoring these warnings as a result of knowing this is (allegedly) happening? If so is the Disavow tool just another way for Google to get a list of all possible spammy sites to manually penalise?

To pull it all together

I for one will not be recommending that any of our clients use this tool as it is simply too dangerous. Instead my recommendation would be to block any access to webmaster tools accounts for anybody who shouldn’t have access, perform a manual link audit and continue to manually remove any links that blatantly stand out from the crowd as being bad.

Do your best using this method and just leave the ones you can’t get removed quickly. I am a firm believer in linking your way out of a bad situation. If Google can see that you are making an effort by continuing to build quality links then surely it must reward these efforts.

Surely this must be a better use of time than wasting it contacting webmaster after webmaster asking to get links removed and then finding out that the site is a dead end.

If Google truly want to stop link spam then they should just publish their list of bad links and people will stop using them. Simple.

For help with your Digital Marketing and SEO please contact us by giving us a call ro using our contact form. We are here to help ion anyway we can so don’t suffer in silence

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Discovering Your Value Proposition

Danny Travis-Brown — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:57:18 +0000

Any company that offers a product or service has a value proposition; whether or not they know it is a different matter however. Commonly, companies find themselves looking for a way to get a potential customer interested in their product or service, only to get progressively more frustrated as new offers and sales just don’t return the results they were hoping for. This is where a well-communicated value proposition comes into play.

The application of a good value proposition can be broken down into two parts: identification and communication.

Identifying your Value Proposition

An effective value proposition should answer the following question:

If I am your ideal customer, why should I choose you over your competition?

Answering this question is simpler than you may think, but it may take a little reshuffling at the business end to discover your best value proposition.

To become the best choice for your ideal customer, you must differentiate from your competition by exceling in one element of your offer; whether that is “voted UK’s number one retailer of oven mittens”, “97% of our customers would use us again over any other retailer” or “unbeatable price match guarantee”. Look at the claims your competitors are making, and ask yourself how you can stand out from that crowd with one short, effective sentence.

In most cases, the ideal prospect wants to know what they get from choosing you, or why you are the right choice for them; they don’t want to think and they don’t want to scour your website to stumble across valuable information or offers.

If you use the first few seconds of their attention to talk about the industry you are in, the founding of the company or the team in head office rather than your unique selling point then they will simply retort with a simple “so what?”, and leave to find a competitor who is willing to put their offer on a plate.

Simply put, your value proposition is what your customers get from choosing you that they would not get from choosing a competitor.

Communicating your Value Proposition

Now comes the trickier part, effectively expressing the value proposition.

There are many things to consider when refining an effective value proposition; in the latter stages of testing we would look to incorporate congruence, continuity and credibility through all stages of the conversion process, but for now let’s concentrate on some easy to digest, actionable principles.

Heads Up

Two of the most powerful weapons in your VP arsenal are your header and sub-header; with these you can grab attention, highlight your unique selling point, add credibility or direct to conversion. It’s vital that your header acts as a quick, effective means of engaging visitors in a conversation, and drives them to read on by earning their interest.

Here’s an example of an ineffective header and sub-header:

“Find out how our specialist software can save you time and money”

“At Daniel Travis Brown software ltd, we have a great range of accounting software solutions, read on to find out more! “

And now a more effective, amended version:

“Save time and money with our range of custom-built accounting software packages”

“We will put together an accounting software package that meets your needs entirely, all for the unbeaten price of £79! “

The original version prompted the reader to find out more; already we were opening with a task for the visitor, without giving them any real information. We then followed it by prioritising the company name in the sub-header and failing to mention the competitive price that is on offer.

In the amended version, we grabbed attention immediately with “save time and money” and then went into further detail in the sub-header, mentioning the “unbeaten price” and custom-built package.

This gives the customer all they need to read on; they now know about the low price and product/service, and many of them will now be closer to converting than they would ever have been with the previous headline.

Now, an Ineffective Real-World Example

Compared to an Effective Real-World Equivalent

Notice the first example gave no information about the service; instead they tried to convince the reader to read on without giving any incentive. The second example however immediately shows the hosting service is: reliable, secure, located in the UK with onsite engineers, allows hosting of multiple websites, features 24/7 support and more. In the top right there is information about a 70% three month discount and below is an award from computer shopper. All of the information is clear, easy to digest and most importantly gives multiple incentives to the user, driving them to read on.

There is much more to expressing an effective value proposition than simply revising your headline, but this is a great starting point and will help you learn the principles or value identification and communication.

For help identifying an effective value proposition and more on our CRO Services, call the Web Vitality Heroes today for super powered conversion rate optimisation

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What We Know About The Panda Update And Panda 20?

Mark Farrell — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:21:15 +0000

I know this blog post is a long time coming but after Panda 20 and before we begin we would like to say a big thank you to Google for letting Panda loose on the internet. It was getting harder and harder convincing clients that great content will eventually outperform those spammy websites that were continually out ranking them in the SERPs.

Along came Panda back in April 2011 and wiped loads of terrible websites out, fact. We have purposely kept quiet on this subject over the last eighteen months as we wanted to see how Panda progressed and what Google were going to do with it. From our perspective there are lots of flaws and they still a long way to go although for the most all we are seeing are positive improvements.

Thankfully since the first update there has been many tweaks to the algorithm which shows that Google are not going to be happy just letting it run. They obviously want to keep improving it which is good to see and will keep webmasters and SEOs constantly on their toes. Throw into that the Penguin update (another post altogether) and it’s plain to see why the SEO industry has had to take a long hard look at the way it works and completely change.

What Is Panda?

There are lots of articles and videos out there that explain exactly what the Panda update so we are not going to go into that here. What we will do is break it down very quickly in terms even a real Panda might understand.

Panda came about as Google found a way to scale the machine learning process allowing them to produce much more complex algorithms that matched human behaviour much more closely. They basically sat a lot of people down and had them look at lots and lots of websites saying which ones they liked and which ones they didn’t.

After lots and lots of coffee they ended up with a long list of pros and cons for each of the sites that they were asked to review. These results were then compared for similarities and fed into the machine learning process and Panda was born.

Basically Panda is a set of rules that looks at a site as a whole and takes lots of different user metrics into account when deciding if it should rank or not. In laymen’s terms if a site is well built, easy to navigate, looks good and has content on it that people absolutely love then you should be OK and stand a good chance of ranking high in the SERPS.

If Only It Were That Simple

Let’s take a deeper look at what we mean by well, built, well designed, easy to navigate and awesome content.

Well Built and Nice Design

If we take it back to lots of people sat in a room offering their opinion on which sites they liked and which ones they didn’t it goes without saying that the first thing they would notice is the look and feel of a website. If they liked the look of it then it would automatically tick that box.

What we are thinking is that it is trying to get rid of those horrible looking websites that look like the early FrontPage designs with lots of flashing buttons that could be produced in about five minutes. Either that or the sites only purpose in life is to generate a stupid amount of affiliate income for somebody at the expense of a good website.

or

Easy To Navigate

Usually when we talk about navigation it is from a crawl ability perspective. Here we are talking about navigating from a user’s perspective. In order to work well with Panda sites need to be easily browse able with a clear easy path to the desired goal.

Is Content Still King?

Here is the big one for us. Everybody has always said that content is king and Panda has kind of proved this. However, there is absolutely tons and tons of unique content out there already. There is tons and tons of unique great content out there already.

Simply producing great unique content is no longer enough for a website to be Panda safe. This area is where most clients fall down.

Back to that room of people. They will have seem lots of websites all of which will have had original decent content on it so what did they say about that?

In the post Panda world, to succeed you will have to go that one step further and produce content that your readers say “wow” to. There is no point in getting somebody to sit there and just write original stuff as with machine learning this is easily identified especially if your site is quite big.

To succeed today every single page on your website needs to be quality. If it isn’t it seems that the golden rule is to either remove it or block it completely from the search engines. If you don’t you run the risk of the rest of the site being pulled down the rankings by association.

What Should I Be Looking At?

Keeping a close eye on your sites metrics has always been advisable but as Panda is heavily focussed on the user it makes more sense to look deeper at user metrics and try and improve them.

Take into consideration that Google controls Google Chrome one of the fastest growing search engines on the planet, not to mention Google Analytics these guys have a hell of a lot of user data at their fingertips so why not use it to their advantage.

We mentioned user navigation earlier on in the post and a good way to monitor this is through our old favourites bounce rate and time on site.

Bounce Rate

In the past we have always told our clients not to be too concerned with the bounce rate figures as we were more than confident that we were directing traffic to the most relevant pages. We were happy that visitors were finding exactly what they were looking for without having to browse and then leaving happy.

If Panda is taking into account user experience more and more we are now suggesting that we try and offer each visitor something else useful to lower bounce rate. If we are adding to a users experience by enticing them to look at something else then surely this will be perceived as a positive indicator.

An easy way to do this without over optimising your site with lots of anchored internal links maybe to offer your latest blog titles on your main site or even offer up related posts at the end of each of your blog posts.

Time On Site

Being honest, in the past this isn’t a metric we looked at in any great detail either but over the last eighteen months we have been working hard to increase this across the board for all of our clients.

How did we do this I hear you ask? Quite simply we produced better content. The content we started producing was even better than that we produced before, as it was better it was inevitably longer and had more substance to it. By substance I mean more pictures, break out headings, bullet points, videos internal anchored links. All of these add to the user experience and keep them on the site longer.

Search Engine Click Through Rates

We know that Google has access to your sites click through rates and publishes these figures within the GWT area. Why offer these up if they were not using them themselves?

In the past SEO companies used the title tags, meta descriptions and snippet mark-up areas to boost rankings by stuffing keywords in there but in a post Panda world they now have to be used for what they were originally intended for; getting people to click through to the site.

Please excuse how small lettering all we are trying to highlight is a sample page in the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard

Diversity Of Search

This is another area we believe needs focussing on. Panda is very big on brands therefore it makes sense that Google will monitor and reward websites that have people searching for it or clicking through to it from brand related terms.

The Penguin update made people stand up and smell the coffee when it comes to diversifying anchor text. Post Panda it is better to let the website pages determine what the site is about and use brand related anchor text for your linking campaigns right across the board.

Not just because it makes your site look more natural but because we know that Panda favours brands so to succeed you have to become a brand. That might be a bold statement and some people will no doubt disagree but putting yourself out there as a brand in our opinion is the way forward. It’s just a small matter of how do you go about achieving that (yet another post)

What To Take Away From The Above

Panda isn’t going away. Google will continually improve this algorithm and what we have noticed is that they seem to be performing a data refresh every 30 or 40 days.

What this means is that if you make some drastic changes the day after an update don’t be surprised if nothing major happens until the next update.

If you keep your site in good order and focus on producing only top quality stuff and get rid of anything that might be considered low quality your site will stand the test of time.

What Qualifies Web Vitality To Make The Above Comments?

After the latest Panda update Panda 20 we looked at all of our clients analytics again since the first update and not a one of them has been hit (significantly) by either Panda or Penguin.

When we looked why, we decided to put together all of the above as this is what we do day in and day out and the below graph from one of our clients just proves it:

For Digital Marketing that will stand the test of time (and any algorithm updates give us a call or drop us an email as we are more than happy to help you claw your way back from any update

Image Links

Panda Picture – http://www.flickriver.com/photos/swamibu/887295065/
Kitty Image – http://www.theittybittykittycommittee.com/2009_12_01_archive.html
Angry Panda – http://www.forkparty.com/1906/know-your-pandas

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Principles of the ‘Landing Page’

Danny Travis-Brown — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:04:56 +0000

Ensuring your website is performing to the best of its ability will always be an on-going process. Creating more channels for inbound traffic (and in turn designating more landing pages) will open up new opportunities when it comes to encouraging visitors to convert; but are your landing pages performing as they should be, or are they yielding a worryingly high bounce rate?

Optimising a page for conversion is by no means simple; there are thousands of potential changes and tests to be carried out on each page, all of which could have a surprisingly good or disappointingly poor effect on your conversion rate. There are however, certain ‘safe’ rules and principles that you can apply to your landing page which will reduce ‘conversion friction’ and create a smoother transition between landing on the page and continuing towards conversion.

1-      Make Clear your ‘Call-to-Action’

As obvious as it may seem, it’s surprising how many online companies complicate their conversion process by clouding their primary ‘call-to-action’ with attention grabbing content. A simple and informative headline and short but detailed subheading are great at showing off what you offer and also directing visitors to conversion, but by adding distractions to your site you can take a huge amount of attention away from the primary focus of the page: the path to conversion.

Whether your call-to-action is a registration form, a ‘buy’ button or an enquiry submission, your route to conversion should be easy to see, simple to complete and unintimidating. If your visitor has to think about what they are supposed to do on your landing page, it’s unlikely that you will then see them convert.

Remember, make your offer clear in your headline, quickly detail the benefits in your subheading and ensure your call-to-action is above the fold and draws the eye more than anything else on the page.

2-      Exceeding Expectations

Your landing page should be exactly what visitors expect when they make that decision to click through; ensuring they see exactly what they came for when they arrive (or even a little more) can be that first all important ‘micro yes’ on the path to conversion. Often, companies will tempt visitors to opt-in for a free trial or consultation, only to over-face them with details on monthly subscriptions or registration forms. Visitors will immediately pick up on this kind of misdirection and more often than not, will abandon the website. There’s plenty of time for details regarding subscriptions and registration later; if you have offered the visitor something or told them something is waiting on the next page, make sure it is there waiting for them.

This principle should be applied through all channels to each landing page; if your landing page’s meta-description displayed on a search engine’s results page details the great features of your winter mittens, you should make those savings prominent when the visitor arrives.

If you have ‘promised’ something is waiting for users that click through, make sure that is exactly what you give them. Deceiving visitors will likely lose your site a lot of credibility.

3- Simplify the Registration & Enquiry Process

It’s unavoidable that in some industries companies are required to collect a great deal of data and personal information as part of their conversion process. Perhaps visitors need to give a description of their enquiry to outline exactly what kind of service they require, or the specifications of your service or product need to be detailed and extensive.

It’s important to remember that the more extensive data collection (such as enquiry specifications) can be left until a later stage; the priority is the initial registration, enquiry or newsletter sign-up.

Once you have the appropriate details to initiate first contact with the prospect, you can collect further details in incremental steps via email or telephone; this will allow you to avoid asking for too much information in one sitting and risk losing the conversion.

4- Too much Text

Landing pages which display dense blocks of text upon arrival can be intimidating. Think about it from your visitor’s perspective; do you want the only thing on their mind when looking at this for the first time will be “Do you expect me to read all this?”

It’s unlikely that you’re visitors have found their way to your website with the intention of reading through masses of text; they want quick information within seconds of landing on your site, and it’s your job to give it to them. Highlight exactly what the visitors need to know, clearly and concisely; save your masses of copy and text for a page dedicated to product or service details. Any perks or offers that were buried in the copy should be worded into your grabbing headline, and detailed in your subheading. A heading such as “Sign up today to receive your free 30 day trial” can direct attention to the conversion (the sign up) and highlight how the user can benefit too.

Optimising a website for conversion is an extremely lengthy and complicated process, and the methods used to effectively identify ‘conversion killers’ and replace them with more effective features is a science in itself. But by ensuring your landing page adheres to these basic principles, you can create an solid foundation on which to build and test the content of your pages one step at a time.

For specialist help regarding conversion rate optimisation, contact Web Vitality today!

The examples shown above were taken from the following websites:

http://www.vuze.com/

http://www.sealskinz.com/

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Content Creation: Home pages and About Pages

Mark Farrell — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 12:18:50 +0000

Creating content is essential to the success of the site. It will determine how much information a user has to read on the rest of site, it’s responsible for telling them what they can find across the sites content and lets them get used to the tone which your site is written and laid out in.

The following is a check list of all the things which you need to consider BEFORE writing the introduction content on your “home” or “about” page;

-          Decide on your sites overall “tense”: It’s a good idea for your site to have one universal tense running throughout. If you’re going to be saying “our range can offer you competitive prices” then this is the tense you should stick with. This applies to all businesses and sectors.

-          Decide on your contents level of formality: Just as the tense for your site needs to be universal so does your formality. Depending on the style and purpose of your business or company your site will have a unique level of formality. For example you might decide that your bathroom company needs a friendly family tone, then this is the formality you need to keep throughout your site regardless of the information you’re delivering.

-          Begin to develop your overall tone: The overall tone of your site is a combination of the pre determined tense, formality and the way in which you display your content, plus other less obvious methods which all come together to create a tone for your site. This tone is what will give your site its personality, which in turn is what you will be using to strengthen your brand and increase trusts and authority.

-          Develop brand authority through quality writing: Regardless of the formality and tone of your writing the content needs to be fairly to the point and clear of needless jargon and meaningless terms. These irritate likeminded business people in the same sector and confuse others. Confusing people who visit your site is the ultimate mistake to make, a confused reader is a “back clicking” reader.

Remember:

Home pages generally need to be to the point; they also need to be fairly sales orientated, but subtlety so with at least one “call to action”. They need to create and then re-enforce brand strength and trust, but without discouraging people from moving on to more specific pages.

After creating and enforcing your sites tone the main focus of your “home” and “about” pages are to inform users what there is to be found on the site. You need to inform readers and users about the specifics of your business and what they can expect from you and your site in general.

The Web Vitality home page is a great example of how each of these things can be brought together:

“Based in the heart of Manchester City Centre are a team of truly unique individuals with a shared passion for the mystical art of digital marketing.” Which tells the reader what we do, where we’re based, what the tone is and that we’re formal and knowledgeable without being boring and still maintaining a sense of humour.

This is a lot to fit in perfectly in a single sentence but it’s a great idea to this for an opening statement; simple, easy to read, informative and to the point.

This should be the format for your entire home page and about pages, with every base covered but as quickly and simply as possible.

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Guest Blog Outreach Emails: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Steph — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:36:51 +0000

Guest blogging is an incredibly popular form of link building, one which has made outreaching for locations incredibly hard as the competiveness has increased. Are blog owners tired of receiving endless emails asking for links from internet marketers jumping on the band wagon?
Guest blogging is a great way to build links, but as more people have caught on it’s harder to receive a positive response. One aspect of outreach that lets many marketers down is the initial email, which is often boring, generic and doesn’t inspire the blog owner. Here are a few examples of outreach emails ranging from the engaging and inspiring to the downright awful.

Example 1: The Good

This is the kind of outreach email you should be writing. Bear in mind, there’s no “right way” to do it; you generally tailor your outreach email to the tone of the recipient’s site. For example, a personal blog is perfect for going down the ‘ego’ route. Compliment the blog author on one of their latest posts, if they had a travel blog you could say something like; “really enjoyed your post on visiting India, the toilets really did look awful!” A comment similar to that shows you’ve taken the time to read their blog posts and that you’re actually human! Always pass comment on something that a robot couldn’t possibly know or generate. Humour is good too.

Template

Hey Steven,
I’ve just been reading your latest post on your trip to Blackpool and I was in stitches when I read about you and your friends taking a ride on the donkeys! It must have been so embarrassing! I Tweeted it to my friends, I know it’s something they’d appreciate too!
I’ve recently just visited Brighton and have some really good stories I think your readers would enjoy. Would you be interested in featuring a humorous piece? I write for The Travel Site www.example.com check it out, you never know you might find a post you enjoy on there too!
Look forward to hearing from you soon,
Steph

Example 2: The Bad

Some people find that writing template emails and firing them out to numerous blog owners in their niche is a quicker way to contact multiple bloggers quickly. Whilst this is definitely true, there’s often no personality to the email and no personal address. This can come across really spammy and although you probably will get comeback from someone, the quality of their site is usually questionable (why as a blog owner, would you host content from someone who has no interest in your website?). The following template is one to avoid (unless you’re purposely looking for a low-value location).

Template

Dear Sir/Madam,
I was browsing through your travel blog and really enjoying your posts. I was wondering if you accept guest authors as I can offer you an article on travel. I write for The Travel Site so would link to there from my post.
Let me know if you’re interested.
Best regards,
Steph

Example 3: The Ugly

Now for the awful method of outreach: the spam-tastic approach filled with typos and bad grammar. Misspelling the blog owners name is the ultimate insult too! Not only will you receive little response, you’ll also most likely anger blog owners and earn yourself a pretty bad reputation in the blogosphere. Avoid this method at all costs (unless you really do want to irritate people).

Template

Hello Stven,
I’ve been looking thrugho your blog and love the posts. Can I write a bglo post for you on something travel related?
Thanks,
Steph

There’s no one method of outreach that’s tried tested and works on everyone, much like asking someone on a date. You have to tailor your outreach to the individual, do a little background research and poke around on their site to get a feel of the tone. Although it takes more time than sending out generic emails, it’s time well-spent.

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Building an Effective Online Presence from the Ground Up

jamie.lyons — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:29:33 +0000

An Introduction to the Series

An online presence can serve as a shop window, a sales force and a checkout – with seamless transition from one stage to the next.

Once a functional and effective website is in place it can almost automatically convert leads into prospects and prospects into sales without the need for much (if any) human intervention on the part of the company.

With the Building an Effective Online Presence from the Ground Up series I hope to provide an overview of the major stages and processes involved in evolving an existing business into a successful online brand. Although this series will undoubtedly help those looking to establish a purely online business from scratch – my focus is upon two different types of company:

1 – Established businesses who presently operate in a purely offline capacity but are looking to build an online presence.

2 – Businesses who already operate online but who are not experiencing the results they would hope for (and are willing to make radical changes to remedy this).

Having established my aims with this series it’s time to get started:

Establishing Viability

Before jumping headfirst into website creation it is essential to thoroughly consider the reasons why you’re building an online presence and what you intend to gain from it.

Establish Aims

If you’re a retailer then your primary aim will likely be revenue generation through e-commerce sales – for some industries however, the goals are not quite so clear-cut. Those who operate in the B2B arena may wish to build a website which serves as a sales brochure to elicit enquiries from prospective clients, whilst other organisations could well create a website purely for increased brand exposure.

Specific goals and aims must be established before anything else is done to ensure that all aspects of your website and online marketing are tailored to best serve the business and achieve your stipulated goals.

Establish Market

With goals and aims freshly established there remains the vital task of assessing whether the market exists for you to achieve a high enough volume of conversion (completions of established aims) to justify the cost of entering the online arena. Examination of competitor websites and use of tools such as the Google Adwords Keyword Research tool will help you to understand the demand for your product, service or offering. Essentially, the more people using search engines to search for terms (referred to as ‘keywords’) which are relevant to your industry: the more of a pre-existing market there is.

If there does not appear to be a significant pre-existing market, then you will have to be especially ruthless during the course of the next stage.

Establish Budgets, ROI + KPIs

Unless you have web design, web development and web marketing specialists in-house (in which case this whole series of blogs is unlikely to be of much use!) the creation and development of a website and the subsequent digital marketing services will require capital. How much capital is dependent upon a vast number of variables; not to mention your available budget. At this stage the services of a digital marketing agency are likely to be incredibly useful. Digital marketing specialists are able to outline the website functionality you’ll require to achieve your goals, the cost of website design, development and maintenance and the cost of SEO and other online marketing services to ensure success.

By consulting closely with a digital marketing agency – or indeed utilising your own experience you will be able to establish two vital acronyms: ROI and KPIs. The Return On Investment is essential – if you can’t foresee an ROI which offers definite benefit to your company then it may be necessary to re-think your aims and market. Key Performance Indicators serve as benchmarks – basically a series of targets which demonstrate that you are on course to achieve (or better) your desired ROI. Any digital marketing company worth their salt should be able to assist you in formulating and ultimately facilitate the attainment of KPIs spanning from website development through to 12 months from launch.

If the figures add up so far then it’s time to move on to the next step – Getting Online.

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