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Archive for October, 2009

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Death of GeoCities

October 27th, 2009 | Author: Richard Butler, SEO & SEM Consultant

If you remember the good old days of the internet you will no doubt remember the buzz that was geocities. It was one of the first virtual communities online where you could set up a website in a related neighbourhood. For example there was an a technology community, a design community, the list was endless.

It was amazing you could set up your own website within minutes and get the tools you needed to create your site. I remember being a member of the community and monitoring other users websites to ensure they did not violate guidelines etc. It was fun, it was sense of community and it was what the web was all about.

The site was bought over by yahoo in 1999 for an estimated 3 billion dollars. It still grew and added more services. As of last month it was getting 10 million visitors a month. Then I just heard the news… Yahoo are to close the site down. Yes not sell it, not leave it there but close it down. Apparently they have other things to do.

Now to me this just stinks! The people created the site, they made it grow, the developed it and now what they want to do is just close it down.

I am shocked by their decision please leave your comments below

Posted in Rant | Tags: | 1 Comment »

What is Viral Marketing?

October 27th, 2009 | Author: Richard Butler, SEO & SEM Consultant

Viral marketing is a term that we’ve heard a lot about especially in recent times when it comes to internet marketing, however what exactly is viral marketing?

Let’s look first as to what is meant by a virus. A virus is something that is spread very quickly and is nearly unstoppable. When you combine this concept with marketing, which is letting people know more about your product or service you get a very powerful means of getting your brand known.

So what is a viral marketing campaign?

In order for something to be viral it must spread across the internet quickly and become known. When talking about the power of viralness, we should refer to videos that have become popular online. For example a video of one of Susan Boyle had over 1 million plus views in a number of days. Susan Boyle was a contestant on a reality talent show. The video got mass appeal by people spreading the word via email, forums, news postings etc. suddenly even the main stream media were picking up on the story of this video with over a million views. Another example is the Numa Numa video or the evolution of dance – just google these and you will see how popular they are.

Another prime example and probably one of the best known was the mystery surrounding the Blair Witch Project. This was a low budget film that grossed in millions mainly thru word of mouth and mystery. Was it real? Was it just a film? No one really knew but many went to the cinema to find out.

Getting a viral campaign right.

This can be the tricky part, as the internet population will be your ally when it comes to a viral campaign, however you as a marketer have to be clever. If you create a campaign and it’s too blatant an advertising/marketing ploy the campaign can flop or there can be a huge backlash. This has happened on many occasions. The idea is to do something that is funny, has potential to be sent onto friends.

Examples would include ads that are too “hot” for TV, i.e. they might not get past the exacting standards, outtakes from TV shows or movies. Something that gets people talking is essential for viral marketing, it has to be something out of the ordinary, something different.

Do I have to spend lots of money producing videos etc?

Not really. It can be something quite simple like a good quality free report that you encourage people to download and share. It might not reach a mass audience, however if it is good information it will be shared and you will have your brand exposed to more people.

The key is that it must be something that is useful and in the case of a report, have a perceived economic value. For example a self development report. A report on 10 reasons why the bank are not giving you enough interest.
If you have the budget you could create a flash based game. You could set up a free service on the internet (look at twitter or Facebook). How about an iPhone application?

What is the purpose of your campaign?

Like any marketing device you have to answer the one basic question – what do I want to get out of this campaign? More profits? More brand recognition? A list of subscribers? What ever it is you must be clear on what your outcome is. Once you know what is the outcome you must make sure you target your campaign to the right audience.

If your target market is 30 somethings there is no point in creating a viral application on Bebo – perhaps Facebook is more appropriate.

In sum viral marketing is a fantastic tool if your campaign is created correctly.

To get more tips join my newsletter on this page.

Posted in Web Marketing | Tags: , | 1 Comment »

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-10-25

October 25th, 2009 | Author: Richard Butler, SEO & SEM Consultant
Posted in Twitter Posts | Tags: | No Comments »

What is PayPal?

October 21st, 2009 | Author: Richard Butler, SEO & SEM Consultant

PayPal is a payment processor website.  This means that they will allow you to accept credit card payments online without having to have a merchant account.  All you need to do is to sign up at paypal.com and open up an account. I recommend that you upgrade your account to a business account as personal accounts have limits on the amount of money you can take in and generally will cause you more hassle as your online business grows.

Once you have your account set up you create a buy now button which allows you to put a button on your website that people can click on to purchase your product.  The purchaser is then re-directed to PayPal where they can either use their account if they have one or they can sign up, or if they prefer they can just enter in their credit card details and make the purchase.

Every time you receive money you are charged a percentage of the transaction and a fee of about 40 cent.  This can add up. If you sell something for $/€97 you may incur fees of $/€3, therefore you should budget this into the price of your product, rather than sell for $/€97 sell for 100 to cover the fees.

PayPal allows you to do a direct deposit to your bank account which is very handy or you can leave the funds in your account to buy products online.  As your business grows PayPal will request more information about your business. For example they have thresholds where they will freeze your account and ask for more information about your business. Be aware of this, however it is standard practice as they are trying to avoid credit card fraud and money laundering.

PayPal is essential if you wish to do business online and can not afford or do not qualify for a merchant account.

Posted in Tools for doing business online | Tags: , | No Comments »

What is e-junkie?

October 20th, 2009 | Author: Richard Butler, SEO & SEM Consultant

E-junkie is a website that allows you to sell online digital goods through PayPal. Now this is nothing new but what is great about e-junkie is it allows you to have a protected download area. You see the normal process for selling with PayPal is as follows. You create your buy now button, you then redirect the customer to a special page on your website after purchase. That’s great and dandy, whoever two things can happen:

Your download page can get indexed by Google, thus allowing those who have not paid access to your product

Your download page can get shared by someone who bought your product.

Both of these scenarios are not ideal as it means lost sales to you and free products to people who should not get them (in effect they are stealing from you.)

With e-junkie you don’t have to worry about this. You upload your product to their site and set an expiration for the download page. This means that after X amount of hours or days the download page disappears. If the person did not download in time they must contact you to get a new code page re-issued.  Also you can limit the amount of times the product is downloaded so if the url or web address is shared potentially only X amount of people will be able to steal from you.

Although this sounds complicated it is very very easy to set up and will help you gain more customers and keep your products safe.  E-junkie also have an easy to use affiliate program that you can get people to sign up for.  In my experience it’s a great service.

Posted in affiliate marketing | Tags: , | No Comments »

What is affiliate marketing?

October 19th, 2009 | Author: Richard Butler, SEO & SEM Consultant

To be honest you’ve done this before and you did not even know! Affiliate marketing refers to the process of promoting a business or service and then getting paid for doing so. However offline you do this all the time. You recommend a business or a restaurant and tell your friends you should go there it’s great, but you never get paid!

Online it’s different. You can recommend a product or service and if the person buys based on your recommendation you get paid a percentage of the sale. This could be anything from 5% to 75% depending on the product or service.

Many large companies have affiliate programs such as Amazon, eBay, and even hotels. You simply place a link to from your website and get paid.

Ok so how can you use this? Let’s say you are a computer trainer. You might recommend people to buy a certain anti-virus software or perhaps a back up solution. Now instead of not getting paid, why not set up a website and list these products or review them on your site? Every time someone clicks and buys you get paid.  Make it a resource site and you could start to generate additional income.  Or you might set up a site about travel in your country. With a bit of searching you will find that many of the hotels have an affiliate program you can join. From a promoters point of view the great thing about affiliate marketing is you don’t have to develop the product or worry about customer service – the seller does all that, all you have to do is promote!

From a website point of view there’s plenty of opportunities, however as a business owner you can also set up an affiliate program and get others to promote your site and only pay them on a sale or no sale basis.  This in effect means that you can have an army of sales people who will promote your service on their site and you only have to pay them if they make a sale.

If you are selling digital products you can set up your product on clickbank.com and they will look after everything for you. You just set up an affiliate page on your website, and then people will automatically get paid from clickbank.  You don’t really need to do anything more.

If you are looking for affiliate products to promote clickbank is also great to find them, and you’re sure to find something in your niche.

Posted in affiliate marketing | Tags: , | No Comments »

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-10-18

October 18th, 2009 | Author: Richard Butler, SEO & SEM Consultant
Posted in Twitter Posts | Tags: | No Comments »

What is the fold?

October 17th, 2009 | Author: Richard Butler, SEO & SEM Consultant

The fold is a term you may often hear when it comes to designing websites. The fold is the first page or screen that a visitor sees when they visit your site. It is deemed to be prime “virtual real estate” or VRE. What this means is that the important information should be contained in this area, or above the fold.

The actual term I believe goes back to newspapers. When you look at a folded newspaper the most important information is above the fold, that is the headline. You need to use the same principal on your website. Some people will not scroll down to the next screen. Therefore if the important information is not above the fold they might not get to read it.

The problem some people run into is that they have a big flashy banner or a large area at the top of the page with their company logo or name. On some computer screens this make take up a large percentage of the fold, thus loosing a lot of the important information on the page.

Always view your site on a number of computers to see how the computer affects the site – some sites look different when viewed on an apple. Think about those using mobile devices will they be able to see the important information?

Important information would be your headline for your product or service, and some teaser text to pull the people in to continue to read. Remember that newspapers use the inverted pyramid style. Lots of general information to pull people in at the top of the article or page, and then more details as they read on. The important thing is to get people interested.  It is important to note that visitors or at your site for 2 reasons. One for information and two to see what’s in it for them (WIIFM).  Give your readers what they want and they may give you what you want ;)

Posted in website design | Tags: | No Comments »

Slow down Cowboy ;)

October 16th, 2009 | Author: Richard Butler, SEO & SEM Consultant

Here’s an interesting post I saw on a forum about search engine rankings. It went like this.

I built a new site about a month ago. I added loads of content to it, over 100 pages and also bought a load of links back to my site but Google still has not indexed it. Why is this!

Ok let’s take this one step at a time. Firstly age does matter with Google. Domains that are older or have a history with Google will rank better. Why? Because Google can see the progression of them. It’s like older and wiser. So if you register a new domain name it will in most cases take longer to rank than a domain that is older. Google wants to make sure that you’re here to stay and will take the age of the domain into consideration.

Secondly when you have content it wants to see the content grow organically.  “dumping” 100 pages into a website overnight will set off alarm bells with Google. It’s just not natural. Google will know you are just trying to increase your rankings. Compare this to a site that publishes about 5 pages a week, over the course of 20 weeks. It again seems more of a natural growth than 100 pages over night.

Thirdly buying links or backlinks is never a great idea. Google will know that you have bought the links and will not always see them as valuable compared to backlinks that were organically gotten.  How does Google know? Well Google knows everything right! Seriously it has algorithms, and ways of knowing these things.

Here’s my tip. Automate your business. Get a system in place that you can drip feed content. Sure you might have a writing spurt, but automate the content so that you can say load up your 100 articles or posts and then allow them to publish over a period of time. This means that by the time your website has 100 pages in it, it has grown over time and is probably starting to rank well.  However you did not manually have to add each and every page every couple of days.

They key to good website management is automation. Check out my post on using wordpress as a content management system for your website.

Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Tags: , , | No Comments »

How important is good graphic design to a website?

October 15th, 2009 | Author: Richard Butler, SEO & SEM Consultant

We all like pretty things. We like to see things that are visually pleasing. This is true for websites. However it is the downfall of many websites. They spend too much time and money on making their site look pretty with graphics and flash animations and forget about the search engine optimisation of their site.

You see when you are indexed by the major search engines, they “read” the text on your page. So if you have a really cool, flashy flash movie on your page, guess what the search engines as of yet can not read the content of it.

Another thing many designers do is create text objects as graphics. This may be for menu or navigation items. Guess what? Search engines can’t read the text of these graphical items. One way around this is to do the following. Save your graphic with a descriptive name, for example business_consulting_image.jpg then use the ALT tag to describe the image.

The ALT tag is alternative text that can be read if the browser does not show the picture or if a visually impaired person is using a device or software called a screen reader. A screen reader will read the ALT tag out to the visually impaired person. Think about this it makes sense. The person will then know what the picture is about.  Regardless of search engine optimisation this is a good practice to get into.

Using CSS or cascading style sheets you can make very attractive and interesting designs and not have to over rely on graphics.

Also think with the search engine in mind, then design around this.  Remember search engines love content so give it to them and they will give you the rankings you deserve!

Posted in website design | Tags: , , , | No Comments »
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