Cyberdo

I seem to be starting a lot of posts with a number these days and here I go again. But before, I get into it, let me start with a question.

“Do you have a blog and if not, why not?”

Okay, so some of you are probably shutting off already. “Blogging is so passe”, I hear you thinking. Or maybe “Yeah, right. When am I going to find time to write a blog on top of all the other work I already do?”. Well, excuses aside here are seven good reasons why you should have a blog.

1.) A blog is a great way to provide free content on your website

Building customer trust is one of the most challenging things to do with a website, but also one of the most crucial. Giving away free information or products is a great way to establish trust in you and your company as people find themselves thinking “Wow, if they’re willing to give away this useful info, we’re bound to get value when we actually shell out our hard earned cash with these guys.”

2.) A blog is a great way to develop content that is related to your product or service.

Search engines love content heavy sites and blogs are a great way to develop content that is related to your product or service. If you stay focused in your blog and talk primarily about topics that your customers would be interested in, search engines will pick up on the keywords in your blog and this will help to boost your website’s rankings for search terms that are related to your product or service.

3.) A blog can help to distinguish you as an expert

Are you an expert in your field? Would your customers call you an expert? Maybe you don’t think of yourself as one, but many others would consider you to be an expert. You probably know a heck of a lot more about your product and service than your customers, which is why they pay you to provide it right?!

So use a blog to show people that you know your stuff. Give away information that is useful, timely and relevant and your customers will love you for it and come to trust that you are the person to turn to in your industry when they need your product or service.

4.) A blog can demonstrate a good work ethic

Okay, let’s face it. blogging can be a bit of work. It takes a certain amount of commitment to sit down regularly and write something that is thought provoking and worth sitting down to read. The corollary of putting in the effort is that others can see that you’re not afraid of a bit of work and this inspires confidence in your ability to provide a service that is worth paying for.

5.) Blogs generate traffic.

Okay, so you may think this sounds pretty close to point 1 and it is. But search engines aren’t the only way that people find your website. People who read your blog and benefit from it, will share articles with their friends by email or on social networks and this in turn will drive traffic to your website.

By generating more traffic to your website you have a greater opportunity to a.) convert that traffic into sales and b.) generate revenue from the traffic (through ad sales or affiliate marketing).

6.) Blogs give you a voice and help people to relate to you as a human

Blogs are a fairly personal medium and reading one you start to feel like you’re listening to someone talking to you. Having this personal connection is important to many people and can help to break up an impersonal or otherwise business focused website and help people to relate to the fact that there is actually a human behind the business who they can relate to and talk to if need be.

7.) You never know where your blog will lead you

Okay, so maybe business isn’t doing so well and you’re ready to look for a job again, or maybe you’re just after a change of pace. For many people blogs are the new CV. Your blog may just help you launch a new career.

Okay, so maybe you’re ready to start a blog. Before you get started remember that choosing the right software for your blog is important. You want software that will be search engine friendly and will allow you to leverage the great new content you’re developing. You also want something that is going to be user friendly and easy to update. I recommend and use WordPress myself but there are lots of other options out there as well so do your research, or pay someone like us to do it for you.

Email marketing is a tricky thing! To start with most people already get too much email, so you’ve got to contend with the fact that there’s a good chance people will just delete your email without even reading it. The occasional person may skim through the email and check out the highlights, but I’m guessing that most people delete most promotional type email they receive with in 3 seconds of opening or previewing it. Try it the next time you’re checking your inbox, how long do you give email newsletters before you hit that delete button?

Okay, so given that you’re email has a fairly small chance of being read, you know from the outset that you’re gonna have to do some work to make your email interesting enough to get a look in. With that in mind, I thought I’d highlight some of the most common mistakes I see people making when it comes to sending email newsletters.

1.) Send out an email with one big image as the content of the newsletter

Okay, this is a big one and probably my one of my primary pet hates. Firstly, most email engines that check for spam see this is a big sign “I’m a spam email” is what it says to them, so if you do this there’s a better than average chance that you won’t even get to the point where someone looks at your email. It’ll just go straight to their junk mail box.

Secondly, even if you email does get to their inbox, if you’ve just got one big image in the email, there’s a good chance that it won’t fit on a smaller screen. Why? Because there are so many different size monitors out there, each displaying one of a myriad of available resolutions, that you really have no idea what size screen will be used to display your email newsletter (the same goes for your website design by the way). If you just chuck a big image in there, after designing the graphic using the fat ass monitor  on your desk, it doesn’t matter how good it looks, it’s gonna seem kinda stupid to the business user toting his 13″ notebook between meeetings in the city. Or the iPhone user browsing through email on his smart phone. The solution to this (as with web design) is to design for the lowest common denominator. In other words, design for the smaller size screens and then the worst that can generally happen is you have too much unused space when displayed on a larger screen.

2.) Assume that your readers are just dying to get an email from you

Hmm, given the intro spiel I just gave you, we already know that this is quite unlikely. Yes, maybe your favourite customer out there does really look forward to receiving your email newsletter, but even that’s a stretch. Getting an email is nothing like talking to someone on the phone or seeing them in person. It’s purely a business transaction. “What’s in it for me?” is all your reader cares about. If you pack your email with value by providing offers or information that is relevant to your target audience, chances are it might actually get read. If you just waffle on for a couple of paragraphs about how great your new website is and then maybe have a couple of sentences about a shitty 10% discount you’re offering on some product or service, chances are your email is going straight to the bin (in about 2 seconds). In which case you have to wonder, “why did I bother writing it anyway”.

Now, I’m not saying your whole email should be about selling your users a product or service. As a general rule, you should have some free content that is likely to be valuable to your users. Otherwise they may be turned off by the hard sell. But on the other hand if you don’t have at least one or two offers in the email, why did you send it in the first place? Okay, it’s great to remind your customers that you’re around and want their business. But if you’re gonna go to the trouble of designing and sending a newsletter, you’d want to have some sort of offer in there that encourages people to actually pick up the phone or contact you (and pay you some money), right?!

3.) Forget all about how your email newsletter relates to your website

Okay for some of you who don’t have a website this may not seem relevant, but I’m guessing most of you do. If you don’t, replace the word “website” with “business branding”. What I’m talking about here is consistency. When you design or create your email newsletter, make sure the look and feel matches that of your website and business branding materials. In other words, don’t use an entirely different logo, or colour scheme to what you have on your website. It destroys brand recognition and any good work you’ve already done to make your website, business cards, letterhead and signage look the same. Make sure your email newsletters match your brand.

This goes for quality levels too. You probably put a fair bit of work into getting your website right and making sure you have quality content on there. So don’t scrimp and save when it comes to sending out your email newsletter. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right!

There’s been some interesting changes recently in the way that Google lists and organises search results. If you haven’t noticed try doing a quick search for a service in your town or city. (i.e. Brisbane photographer for example). I’ve just performed that search from my desk on the Northside of Brisbane. The first listing I see in the results is a photographer that is located about 10kms away. That’s pretty close to where I’m sitting right now. Google has been able to roughly determine where I’m searching from and provide me a listing that is relevant to me based on my location as well as my search query. The next few listings are all Brisbane based photographers as well, some are further away from me than others, but they all service this area and match my search query.

On the right hand side of the listings there’s a map that shows the place holders for each of the results that Google has given me and they’re all marked by a little red place holder with a letter corresponding to the order in which the results were presented. This allows me to see quite quickly, how close any of the businesses are to me and choose one based, not only on the text and images that I see in the results, but based on their location.

If you look at the results you’ll notice that each includes an address and a telephone number, which makes it very easy for me to pick up the phone and call one if I like what I see. That’s great you say, but where is all this information coming from? Well, it’s coming from the Google Places listing that each of these businesses have set up. And the good news is that you can do this too, for free once you’ve set up a Google account.

“But wait a minute”, I hear you ask, “I’ve already got this information on my website, isn’t that enough?”. Well, not anymore I’m afraid. Google now wants you to have a Google Places listing and they are using this information (matched against the information on your website – if you have one) to verify your business and match your location to the location of people searching for your goods or services.

What does that mean for you. Well, it means that you should definitely have a Google Places listing and you should make sure you invest a bit of time and energy into getting your listing right. By right, I mean, making sure that it’s completely populated with your details, what it is you do, even things like images and videos as well. Why do you need to add images and videos? Well, because Google’s ranking algorithm appears to boost the ranking of those with more complete listings.

Another critical part of finalising your Google Places listing is getting reviews on your listing. You’ll notice that in some searches, businesses will be listed with star ratings (4 out of 5 stars for example). The ratings are given to the business by their customers. Google then displays the rating for others to see and use in the process of making a decision about whether or not to contact you.

At present Google are saying that they’re not going to factor user reviews/ratings into their search algorithm, but you can be fairly certain it will affect the way people make decisions about who to call, when they need a service, so this makes it crucially important that you encourage your customers to provide a review on your Google Places listing.

“Okay, so what if I’m too busy to do it myself?” Well, that’s where we come in. We will happily help you setup your Google Places listing for a flat fee of $195. This includes writing your business description for you, with some input from you of course. Why not contact us today to make sure that you’re not missing out on Google Traffic by not having a complete Google Places listing.

Something you see on a lot of websites these days is a little set of icons that link to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc… It’s become all the rage to put up a link on your website to every different type of social media website that you use to give your visitors a chance to interact with you. While this can be a nice idea, in many cases I think the idea has been taken to the extreme and is becoming a bit of a cliche. Done the wrong way it can even make your business look bad.

Now I’m quite happy to admit that I have and do recommended to some clients that they use social media to promote their businesses. I even use Twitter myself in conjunction with my website. But clearly this doesn’t work for everyone, so when and how you should use social media?

Personally I think certain types of products and services lend themselves to promotion via social media. In particular products which are one of the following:

- Visual (i.e. graphical by nature – photography for example)
- Audible (i.e. a song that you can listen to)
- Viral (i.e. typically new/niche products that people get excited about)

That said, some would argue that you can promote any product or service with social media and I think there’s some truth to that too. It comes down to giving people a reason to connect with you online.

Let’s take a simple example. Say you run a small coffee shop, you’ve just spent a bunch of cash getting a groovy little cafe setup and you want to promote it, but you’re low on dollars to do it with, so you think “I know, I’ll use Facbeook to advertise”. You setup a page/or company profile for your business and you put up a little sign on your front counter saying “Connect with us on Facebook (search for ‘Groovy Little Cafe’)”. Great, you think, let’s see what happens…

I can pretty much tell you what’s going to happen! Nothing, zip, nada. You might get a few likes on your Facebook page from your mom and your 10 year old kid and your best friend, but then all you’re left with is a Facebook page that has 3 likes, a little bit of info and not much else. It actually detracts from your brand because it makes you look like you’re desperate.

So what went wrong here, well firstly why does the Groovy Little Cafe have a Facebook profile? Because they want to attract new customers right?! So I would say, mistake number one is putting the sign in the coffee shop. That’s not your target audience. Those people are already interacting with you. You need to get the message out to new people.

Second mistake is not giving people a reason to interact. The cafe needs a hook or an offer of some sort. Maybe a free coffee. What coffee drinker doesn’t like a free coffee (assuming it’s a good one)? Why not have a one week offer promoted solely through Facebook and Twitter whereby anyone who Likes the business page gets a free coffee. Okay, there will be a little bit of overhead in working out who’s getting a free coffee and you’ve got to make and serve the coffee’s themselves, but chances are if you promote it to people that haven’t used your business/service before that some will keep coming and getting coffee. You’ll also be able to keep track of how many people have liked your page (the number is right there on the page) and right away you have some measurable results on how much exposure you get.

Okay, so it’s not rocket science and it doesn’t always have to cost you money. You just need to give people a reason to interact with you. And you need to do this regularly, to keep them interacting. Otherwise chances are, you’re wasting your time.