Using Social Media Marketing simply as a means to blast out your message to everyone you’re connected with is not recommended if you want to build fruitful relationships with them, nor is it a wise strategy if you value your online reputation.

And yet I see people doing it all the time – tweeting, blogging and emailing ‘Buy My Stuff’ messages at irritatingly frequent intervals (they have unfortunately discovered the automated tools after all).

Fortunately, with a little forethought and strategic planning, it can all be so different.

3 Tools to Manage Online Relationships

• Email marketing – Provide valuable information and remember to keep the ratio of Information : Promotion to 70:30.  If people have entrusted you with their email address, don’t make them regret it.
• Use Twitter @ messages – Use the @ function to engage people in conversation.  If all you do is broadcast your own messages and links, you may soon find there’s no-one listening to you.
• Blog comments – use the power of the internet to engage with others and congratulate bloggers on their hard work.

3 Strategies to Build your Online Reputation

• Share – Retweet other people’s posts.  Be generous and don’t hog the limelight.
• Help – Answer questions (on LinkedIn and Twitter), add considered thoughts in the form of blog comments.  Become a respected source of wisdom and contributor to discussions.
• Inform – Share your best stuff on your blog and in your newsletters.  Give it away for free, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what comes back as a result.

Social Media Marketing is such a wonderful way for small businesses to communicate and engage with much larger and more diverse audiences than was possible a few short years ago.  But it can be unforgiving to those who approach it with a self-serving attitude.

It’s true that developing online relationships and building a reputation to be proud of both need working at – but the opportunities that result definitely outweigh the effort!

What’s your experience? Do share in the comments below – and if you found this post helpful, we’d very much appreciate a RT or ‘like’

It’s not uncommon for businesses to need change their website domain and I’ve come across this on many occasions. It could be that the company name is changing due to a takeover or rebrand, a better domain has come up for sale or perhaps even through a legal battle over a domain name. Whatever the reason, there is a right way of going about changing the domain name of a website.

You may think it should just be a matter of uploading the website to the new domain and publicizing the new company name/domain, but there’s much more to it than that, particularly when it comes to the search engines!

Chances are if the old domain has been around for sometime, it’s built up some history and has a reasonable number of links pointing to it. This can all be lost quite easily, so you need to tell the search engines to transfer your links to the new domain. This needs to be done using a ‘301 redirect’ and redirect the old domain to the new domain. That way the search engines will follow any old links to the new site. Google has an explanation about 301 redirects which you can read here.

Make sure you have a 404 error page on the old web pages and redirect visitors to the new domain. A 301 redirect should direct traffic but a 404 page is worth having as a back up too. I’ve written about 404 pages in a previous blog post.

If the structure of the new site is similar to the old site, you can redirect each old page to the equivalent new page via a 301 redirect as well.

Whatever you do, it’s inevitable that rankings will suffer, but these steps are important to minimize the impact! Bear in mind timing as well. If your busy time of year is the run up to Christmas, then avoid any major changes to your website and wait until the new year!

Have you changed your website’s domain? Please let us know why you did it and what the impact was.

Imagine for a moment if all your email marketing messages, email newsletters and blogs you subscribe to were printed out on paper – as opposed to being virtual.  How large a pile of papers would be desposited through your letter box every day?

I think it’s safe to say you’d find it very difficult (if not impossible) to cope with such a massive daily delivery.  And yet we allow our email inboxes and RSS readers to amass more messages and articles than we can ever hope to read in depth – because they don’t (seem to) take up any physical space.

Reading articles and blogs in your areas of interest – both for business and personal enjoyment – is made very easy with the internet.  Unfortunately, finding good quality articles can also mean sifting through a lot of very average offerings.

Even with all the online tools to help manage your online reading lists, there comes a point where you need to look carefully at each of your different subscriptions, for example:

Email newsletters – are you still learning from it or is it time to unsubscribe and move on?
Email marketing lists - if you’re deleting more messages than you read, why are you still on that particular list?
RSS Subscriptions (email or reader) – some people send out the same message by email and simultaneously publish it to their blog.  If you’re subscribed to both, weed out duplications and also any posts you no longer look forward to reading.

If your heart sinks when you look at all your unread emails and blog posts, then it’s time  to be really ruthless and prune out some the overload of information before you get completely swamped by it.  Then you won’t miss the genuinely helpful stuff and you’ll free up enough time to put the good ideas into action.

Have you done any subscription pruning lately?  Do let us know in the comments

At the end of last year I wrote a post about upcoming changes in the world of search in 2010, which you can read here. one of the things I mentioned in the post was the importance of how fast your website loads.

Google has rolled out ‘caffeine’, which is a change in the way it indexes websites. In order to index the web more efficiently, it is crawling website much faster and to satisfy this, your site needs to load in super fast time. You can find out how fast your site loads using Google’s page speed test and you can also find it in webmaster tools which I wrote about last week (link to post) You need to aim for your site to load in about 2 seconds.

If your site is on the slow side, there are a few things you can do to speed it up, which will probably require input from your web developer:

1. Ensure all your images are optimized for the web to load as fast as possible. The same with any pdf, video and other downloads you have on your site.

2. Make sure that the code of your web pages isn’t too ‘bloated’ as this can cause the search engines to slow down while they wade through it.

You can read a useful article about this here

3. Minimise use of flash as this takes time to download and search engines, let alone visitors to your website, won’t hang around for long waiting for it to download.

4. Use a reputable web hosting company and ensure you have adequate bandwidth. If traffic is increasing to your website significantly and as your site grows, it uses more bandwidth. if your bandwidth is inadequate, your site will load very slowly, which is really annoying for visitors to your site! You can read more about what website bandwidth means here.

How quickly does your website download? Is it fast enough to satisfy visitors with ever decreasing patience levels as well as the search engines?

Twitter has recently started to suggest people who you might like to follow, something new tweeters are often unsure about.  It’s still early days to know if this will be a success, so we thought we’d offer a few more ways to find people to follow – and how to be found by others so they can follow you too!

To be found on Twitter, register on Twellow – the Twitter equivalent of the Yellow Pages.  You decide the categories where you want to appear – just like the offline version.  Obviously this is also a good place to search for people to follow.

Another popular place to find people and be found is Listorious.  There are ‘tags’ or keywords (you can choose up to 6 for your entry) and many lists of Tweeters to explore, depending on your areas of interest.

Please don’t be lured by the many spammy sites that promise you hundreds of followers – they make look like fun but they won’t help your business.  And please don’t ‘auto-follow’ people back, it only encourages spammers.  Twitter disabled their version of this function last year, although a few third party services still offer it as a matter of course so if you use them, you’ll need to be sure & opt out.

It makes sense to check out people who follow you and then decide if you want to follow them.  I like to look at their website, find out more about them as a person, or at the very least scan a few tweets first.

Once you’ve connected with a few people on Twitter with whom you have similar interests, take a look at who they have connected with and sorted into Lists.  You can follow the same list of people with a single mouse click!

Twitter is getting very good at blocking spammers, so take care to avoid using the same kind of behaviour adopted by such people.  This includes following many more people than are following you (it’s better for you to have more followers) and following large numbers of people in too short a time period.  It’s no joke when you find your account has been suspended and you can’t tweet with your contacts any more.

To find out who you’re following that isn’t following you back – and vice versa – try Friend or Follow.  It’s a good way to tidy up your Twitter account.

Most of these web-based tools will need to connect with your Twitter account before they can do their stuff.  This is unfortunately also how spammers can potentially get control of your account and start blasting out unsavoury tweets in your name (I’ve seen it several times).  Change your Twitter password often to minimise the risk of this happening to you.

Google has an array of tools to help website owners promote themselves and one particularly useful tool is Webmaster Tools. Whether you manage your website yourself or not, it’s well worth setting up or asking your web developer if it’s already set up for you.

The information provided by the application is very useful, albeit rather technical but gives insight into how well your website is being indexed by Google and if they’re encountering any errors on your site. Other information provided is

• when your site was crawled
• how quickly the pages load (important for Google),
• which keywords your website is being found for and which ones are resulting in click throughs to your site
• which sites link back to your website
• if any malware has been found on your site, i.e if your site has been hacked!

To set up Google webmaster tools, you need a Google account. If you have one already, for example for Gmail, you can use the same login. If not, create a brand new Google account. Once you sign up to Webmaster Tools, you need to verify that you own your website. In order to do this you need to paste some code into the home page of your site or upload a blank webpage – Google will provide the filename for this page. You can ask your web developer to do this for you if you’re unsure, it should only be a 5 minute job!

Once done, log back in and click that your site is verified, then you’ll have access to all this information. You don’t need to check the stats every day, but perhaps every week or so depending on how large your site is.

Let us know of any useful tools you use to keep check on how your site is performing!

If you’ve been struggling to understand social media, what it does and where it’s going – you’re certainly not alone!  In this thoughtful clip, KPCB’s Randy Komisar ponders not only the evolution of Internet content and the types of businesses that it spurs, but questions the Web’s next great phase.

Has your business benefitted from the internet?  What questions does this clip raise for you? We’d love to know!

You’ve probably spent a lot of time, and money, getting your website ‘just so’.  Now you want people to visit it, find out what you do and hopefully, buy from you!  Many people believe Google will instantly bring hordes of potential clients – if only that were true!  Search Engine Optimization takes time to produce results and needs ongoing testing and tweaking.  Using Pay Per Click campaigns will certainly help – but can be expensive.

Whether your business sells products or services, the following list of low-cost and no cost ways to get more visitors aren’t at all techie to do.

1.  Tell people about it – don’t assume everyone knows about your website.  If you’ve recently added something interesting, that’s a good reason to mention it when you’re out networking.

2.  Business card – give people a reason to take a look at your website, offer them something interesting like an article or free report (this will also give you an opportunity to include them in future email marketing campaigns)

3.  Online Directories – there are so many of these directories that they aren’t as useful as a few years ago.  But it’s still worth taking advantage of free listings that include a link back to your website so long as the directory looks reputable.

4.  Social Network Profiles – people you connect with on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are more internet savvy and will probably want to visit your website to find out more about you, even before connecting.  Give them a warm welcome

5.  Email Signature – so often forgotten, this is a great place to encourage people to click through and visit your website (or blog).  Make sure to provide a ‘live’ link and check it works OK.

6.  Postcards and direct mailers – just because traditional mailings are offline, don’t stop promoting your business’s online home.

7.  Letterhead – same as 6. above.  (Does anyone actually use letterheads anymore?)

8.  Invoices – why not include a discreet promotional message and your web address? (I’d advise against anything too brash when you’re also asking for money)

9.  Voicemail – Use the outgoing message to encourage people to visit your website after they’ve left a message for you.  It’s quite unusual, so they may just do it!

10. Articles (online and offline) – If you’ve written something of interest, be sure to provide a link (url offline) so readers can click to find out more.

If you consistently use all the above methods, you will get more visitors to your website.

Do you have anything to add to the list?  Please share in the comments below, we’d love to know

In my last post I mentioned that the summer can be a good time to check out what your competitors are up to so that you can work out what you might need to do to improve your online marketing. There are a couple of tools I use to do this which gives me an idea of what competing sites are up to by reviewing where their back links are coming from.

The first tool is Yahoo Site Explorer:  Just type the url of your website (including the http) into the search box at the top of the page and click on ‘Explore URL’. You’ll get two sets of results. Firstly, the number of web pages of your site that are in Yahoo’s index (under ‘Pages’). Next, if you click on ‘inlinks’, you’ll get a list of sites linking to your website that Yahoo has indexed. You can download the list of links by clicking on ‘Export first 1000 results to TSV’ and then save as an excel spreadsheet.

The next step is to put your competing sites’ urls into the search box and check out their back links.

By reviewing which sites are linking to your competitors, you can find out what marketing they’re doing e.g social media – are there links from Twitter? Do they participate on blogs and forums?

If they regularly appear in industry journals they may have a PR agency working for them. They may have random links, which show that they may have submitted to various directories in the past. However, you may find that there are sites in the list that you could also obtain a link from. Use the link list to get ideas and see where you could improve your online marketing or perform better than them.

A word of warning – the Yahoo Site Explorer tool may not be around for much longer as Bing is due to take over Yahoo’s search results quite soon. You can query back links on Bing by using the following:

“yourwebsite.co.uk” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk

(Type your query in exactly as it is in italics)

You should then get a list of sites linking back to yours or your competitors that Bing has indexed.

Don’t bother querying Google with the same query as Bing as Google doesn’t publicly show all links anyway.

A newer tool available is SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer. The guest version only gives you the first 200 back links, but if you register on the site, you can review up to 1000 back links, which is the same number as Yahoo.

It’s well worth carrying out this exercise every few months just to make sure your on top of your online marketing and keeping up with your competitors! What do you do to keep tabs on your competitors? Please share any tips you have!