As we tell our Savvy Marketer workshop delegates, using the internet to market your small business doesn’t mean you can stop marketing the ‘traditional’ or offline way.  The best results will be achieved with a mix of both sets of tools.

And there are many valuable lessons to be learned from traditional marketing.  Like the need to be constant and consistent.

Consistent in your presence. Social Media marketing is like an overloaded buffet table with so many tempting dishes.  Newcomers are understandably overwhelmed by all the choices available and think they need to be involved in everything.  Not only is this an impossible mission, it’s also a mistake.

To join a group or network, connect with people like crazy for a few days and then not visit again for weeks (or even months) is a completely wasted effort.  This approach wouldn’t work with offline Networking groups either.

If you start a blog or email newsletter, keep posting and publishing regularly; if you join Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other networks, contribute often.

Constant in your message. The business possibilities available to those who embrace social media are exciting and many!  It can be very easy to get carried away and sign up to lots of affiliate schemes, buy dozens of domain names (because they’re available) and slap up squeeze pages by the score …. and then find it difficult to market any of them effectively.

Traditional Marketing 101 tells us to select our area of specialism and define its target market.  Make sure you become known as a specialist in whatever area you choose and only consider adding products and services that fit with your specialism.  Your marketing message will be much easier to craft and to communicate as it will be laser focused.

Get one business up and running – and profitable! – before embarking on the next. Don’t be distracted by all the bright shiny possiblities!

Writing content on your specialist subject or about your products and services is something all businesses need to do, whether for printed brochures or your website. But you can make that content go that much further if you recycle it. Why write articles or papers for a brochure or perhaps for your site and not distribute it as far and wide as possible?

Many businesses are regularly writing great stuff and the further it goes and the more you re-use it, the more word will get out there about your products and services. If you’re not sure what to do with articles and papers you’ve written, here’s a few ideas for you.

1. Newsletters
Include articles in your newsletters and if you’ve some great stuff that may be a bit old, there’s no harm in re-using or updating it. Why write fresh stuff each time if some of the older articles you may have written are still relevant, perhaps just needing a bit of a tweak here and there?

2. Blogs
Blogs are great for re-using papers and articles, and if they’re quite long, you can break them down into bitesize chunks, which are great for blog posts. I revisit old blog posts and update them and it saves a great deal of time when updating your blog.

3. Article Submissions
There are loads of free article submission sites out there, but the best one is Ezine Articles and you can often find articles which have been submitted to this site ranking quite well in the search engines too. If you’re writing new content quite regularly for your blog or newsletter, then don’t forget to submit it as an article to Ezine Articles and perhaps a couple of other article submission sites as it gets your name out to even more people.

4. Offering Content
Not only can you submit articles to sites as above, but some sites will  happily accept third party content as they can’t possibly write all the content themselves. Find out which sites within your area of expertise may accept articles regularly and most of them will give you a link back to your site as well as send traffic, so it’s well worth it as often these sites are quite popular.

There are many ways you can recycle your content, and if you’ve got any tips or found other ways of recycling your content, please let us know!

While there are many clever online tools to help broadcast your tweets, newsletters, blog posts and podcasts, it’s still up to you to be disciplined how you spend your time on social networking, just as you would offline!

The most common excuse we hear from people who don’t take part in social networking is that they don’t have time, yet it’s a pretty safe bet that these same people go to local networking meetings on a regular basis.  Both are important small business marketing activities and need to be fitted in somehow.

Imagine you decided you wanted to join an evening class, start going to the gym or take up a new hobby.  In order to find the time, you may need to give up something else – perhaps some TV viewing would have to go!

It’s time to do an audit of your offline networking commitments.  How many groups do you regularly attend?  How many meetings do you go to each week?  Could you swap one meeting for some online networking?

To attend an offline networking meeting will involve at least an hour (and more likely two) at the venue.  By the time you factor in travelling to and from the event, your time investment is probably the best part of 3 hours (if not more).  That’s more than enough time to take part in some online networking!

Here are 3 tips to help you spend your social networking time wisely:

• Set a daily time-limit and don’t exceed it
• Have a plan of what you want to do during your allocated time and stick to it
• Decide which 2 or 3 networks are most appropriate for your business and focus on building relationships there.

Do you have any social networking time tips to share?  We’d love to hear what works for you!

Many of you probably know that WordPress is a very popular blogging provider. There are 2 versions of WordPress, which I’ve covered in a previous post, and today I want to talk about getting started with the free, hosted version – WordPress.com

Setting up a blog with WordPress.com is quite easy, but getting used to the blog interface can take a little longer. Firstly, go to www.wordpress.com and set up an account, which you’ll need to verify by email. You’ll be asked to name your blog at this point too.  Once your account is active, then log in and this is where you can start to customize it.

The first thing you’ll want to do is choose a template. WordPress’s default template is quite plain and others may be more suitable to match the colours of your branding or just find a template that’s more fun. To find a template, navigate to ‘Appearance’ and ‘Themes’ and you’ll find a good selection to choose from. When you find one you like, activate it and it’ll go live immediately.

Once you’re got your new theme, you can customize it with ‘widgets’ (which I’ve also previously covered in a post) to include information you’d like visitors to your blog to see, for example, archives of posts, post categories, links to other blogs and perhaps even a calendar. You can try out different widgets to see what you like and don’t like – you can put them up and take them down whenever you like.

Before you start posting, check you’re happy with the blog settings in the ‘settings’ option in the left hand menu. Here you can change the name of your blog and add your own tagline. Go through all of the settings options to make sure they’re set correctly and particularly check the defaults for the ‘discussion’ option to make sure you can moderate any comments before they are live on your blog.

When you’ve checked the main settings, then start blogging. WordPress will add a sample blog post, comment and page which you can delete and start your own. I’ll be covering more blogging tips in another post, but until now, happy blogging!

Whether you already have a blog or are just getting started, here are a couple of quick tips to help you get more subscribers to your RSS Feed and keep them!

1.  Make reading your blog easy for RSS Feed subscribers

I noticed the other day that, despite doing some serious housekeeping of my blog feed reader list recently, I still subscribe to nearly 90 blogs!  I tend to save up the posts in my Google Reader and read them just twice a day – as I explained in a recent post.  But I don’t read every word of every post and if the topic doesn’t interest me, I click on the ‘next’ button

When I’m pushed for time, or have a long list of posts in my Google Reader, I’ve found I rarely click through to read the rest of a post (unless the opening lines are especially compelling!) and just move on the next post.

When you publish a blog, there’s an option to publish all (the whole post) or just an excerpt.  I used to select the ‘excerpt’ option, wanting to encourage people to visit my blog.  About 6 months ago I changed my mind and now share the whole post with my feed subscribers because I’d rather they read and enjoy the article than miss it because I’ve added an extra step to their busy day.

2.    Subscribe to your own RSS Feed

Do you subscribe to your own blog feed?  We recommend you do – not only do you want to see what your readers see, you will also be able to check the feed is working properly & catch any problems early.  For example, last month I realised I hadn’t received any posts from one of the bloggers whose posts I look forward to reading each day.

On visiting his site, I found he was still blogging almost every day.  It turned out that his feed address had changed when he started using a fancy new widget – after subscribing to the new feed, normal service has been resumed…. I wonder if he’s aware of what’s happened or is just wondering why his subscriber number has dropped?

Do you have any tips about blogs, feeds or readers?  We’d love you to share by leaving a comment below!

With Google Adwords being the most popular pay per click provider, many small businesses are dipping their toes in to try it out. However, it’s a complex system to learn so over the next few months, I’ll be giving you some tips to help you manage your campaigns that bit better.

One of the first things to learn is keyword settings. Adwords has four settings you can use for your keywords or key phrases: broad match, phrase match, exact match & negative. The default setting is broad match.

What these settings mean is that your keywords can trigger your ads for different keyword combinations depending on which settings you use, which are as follows:

Broad match: Keywords on this setting will mean your ads will show for the keywords you input into your list plus variations of the keyword, synonyms and a range of combinations of your key phrases. For example, a physiotherapist sponsoring the keyword ‘neck pain’ in a broad search could find the ads triggered for keywords such as ‘neck pain and dizziness’, ‘neck pain in pregnancy’ and ‘neck shoulder arm pain’. You may even find your ads triggered for keywords such as ‘neck brace’ so when leaving keywords on a broad match setting, you need to ensure that the keywords don’t trigger your ads for untargeted searches.

Phrase match: This setting is more targeted than broad match and means your ads will be triggered for your keywords exactly with perhaps a word or two before or after your keyword. Using the above example, ‘neck pain’, this keyword on a phrase match could trigger your ads for ‘neck pain in pregnancy’ but not ‘neck shoulder arm pain’. Your keywords will be listed in quotation marks e.g “neck pain”

Exact match: Your keywords will only be shown exactly as you input them into your campaign, so for example, ‘neck pain’ will only trigger your ads for ‘neck pain’ and no other keywords at all. Your keywords will be listed in square brackets, e.g [neck pain].

Many of my campaign keywords usually end up as phrase or exact matches, but there’s no harm in experimenting with broad match, as long as the keywords that trigger your ads are relevant to your offering.

Negative: these are keywords that you don’t want to trigger your ads at all. Using the ‘neck pain’ example, a physiotherapist may not want ads triggered for ‘neck brace’, so ‘brace’ would be included in the negative keyword list.

For more on keyword settings, you can read up on the Google Adwords website.

There was a time when to have a video playing on your website meant you had to have deep pockets.  Even audio involved baffling technology available only to the few.

Well, not any more!  In fact I predict that 2010 will see a huge explosion in the number of small business websites and blogs who use multi-media – it already started to gather momentum in 2009.

Let’s dispel a few myths that may be stopping you from using multi-media on your site.

Myth #1 – I need to hire a professional to do it for me
Of course you can, if you want to and can afford it, but you don’t have to.  All you need are – for audio a digital voice recorder (I use an Olympus) and for video a simple camcorder, like a Flip – both are available for around £100, really easy to use and get the results uploaded to the internet.  And don’t forget the simple downloadable PDF report (which you can create totally free).

Myth #2 – I’m afraid I’ll make a mess of it
When I first used to watch (or listen to) the polished performances on some websites, I would envy their easy style and flowing narrative.  But then I realised – just as the best actors need a prepared script, rehearsal time and sometimes several ‘takes’ to get it right – so do we all!

A lot of people (including both of us!) don’t feel comfortable being in front of the camera.  But that needn’t stop you from having video on your website – you can record your voice and show a slide presentation.

Myth #3 – My business isn’t interesting enough
If you really believe this, you might want to revamp your whole marketing message!  Seriously though, there are many ways to use multi-media in every business.  For example a financial adviser could create a special report with tips about what pitfalls to look out for when buying mortgages, pensions, insurances, investments etc.  They could record a short welcome audio and/or video on their website too.  A chef could use video to demonstrate an easy recipe (and provide a downloadable recipe sheet).

I hope this has given you some ideas and encouragement to try multi-media for your business.

Here are a few resources (of the many available) to get you started:

Audio Acrobat – there’s a free trial version and the paid version is very reasonable too.  They also do video.
YouTube – probably the most well known for short videos.
Viddler – easy to use, with the added advantage of privacy options.

Gaining links to websites isn’t easy and is getting more difficult every day as more and more website owners are inundated with link requests – which are mostly automated.

However, it doesn’t mean you should give up altogether, but means you need to be much more targeted about who you approach and how you ask them. What’s important is to give other website owners a good reason to link to you and your efforts should be a little more successful.

Before you begin though, make sure your site is worthy of being linked to! If you’ve not updated it for a while, or still have areas under construction, then make sure you deal with these things first as you don’t want to put people off from linking to you because of a shoddy website.

You’ll then need to do some research into the type of sites you’d like links from, and possibly wouldn’t mind linking back to (after all, most other businesses you approach will probably want the link reciprocated). If you’re a physiotherapist, the type of sites who may want to link or partner with you are alternative therapists (perhaps a reflexologist or acupuncturist), personal trainers, local gyms or sports clubs etc. Not only would you like them to link back to your site, but these businesses could be potential sources of leads.

Then prepare some short descriptions of your site to send over to the website within your email, you need to make it easy for them to put your link up, so don’t expect them to think of a description for you, it probably won’t be what you’d like anyway.

When approaching the website, try and get the website owners name if possible and make the email a little more personal. Things you might like to include are a bit about your site and what services or products you provide. That you very much like their site and have perhaps already included it on your site (e.g on your links page). You then need to include the description of your site you’ve prepared and your website url.

Give them a good reason as to why they should link to you, perhaps that you could be a good source of leads for each other. Finally end the email and let them know that it isn’t an automated request and they won’t be added to any email lists.

You may never get a response from your email, but that’s just part of link building, so don’t take it personally. Whatever you do though, record who you’ve emailed and when, so that you remember who you’ve approached, and may want to repeat the email a few weeks later. As long as you emphasise what’s in it for them, you should get a much better response than many of the automated requests out there.

For more ideas on link building, you can read a post I wrote last year: Link Building Ideas

If you’ve been online for any length of time, you’ll have noticed there’s a heck of a lot of information available on the internet!  Whether you want to trace your ancestors, learn how to eat more healthily – or find out how to market your small business online – there are more blog posts written about every subject imaginable than you will ever have time to read in a lifetime, let alone a normal busy day.

At the same time, you don’t want to miss important information you need to know.  I’d like to share a couple of tools I find really useful to help me stay on top of my own online reading list.

When I first started subscribing to blogs a few years ago, I didn’t know what RSS was or how it worked – so I used to fill in my email address and have the latest post delivered to my inbox.  As time has passed, I’ve become more protective over my inbox and find it an inefficient way to handle reading matter as it gets mixed up with all the other emails.

Using the RSS feed, I use Google Reader to gather all the latest posts from all the blogs I subscribe to. While there are many other readers available, I’ve only ever used Google and find it very efficient.  As part of my iGoogle home page, I have a Google Reader widget so can see as soon as a new blog post is published.

As with emails, I only read posts a couple of times each day which is usually enough to stay on top of the number of incoming information.  Some posts capture my attention and warrant re-reading or studying in greater detail.  So as not to ‘lose’ a post, I click on the Star symbol which is beside the heading of every post.

If I’m not in Google Reader, or I find a website (or blog) that bears further exploring, I use an service called ReadItLater which is an AddOn to the Firefox brower – although it works equally well with other browsers, iPhones etc.

All you do is click on the ReadItLater symbol (either when you’re on the blog, website or in Google Reader) and the link address is saved in your ReadItLater list.  And once you’ve read it, you simply click the symbol again to remove it from the list.

Both these (free) tools help me to organise the many blogs I subscribe to and ensure I don’t miss anything important to my business!

Just before Christmas, my Forty First website which is built on WordPress was hacked. I didn’t even realize it had been hacked until it was pointed out to me even though I regularly update my site, but had seen no warnings. It was someone who had come to my site using the Safari browser who had found it as they received a warning from Safari not to access my site. None of the words or images had changed, but a malicious script had been added to the site, which could cause malware to harm visitors’ computers. You can see an image of the warning below.

Not having experienced this before, panic set in and I found myself unable and with no idea how to fix it. Thankfully Louise put me onto Debbie Mahler of MICE Training & Technology who has been sorting it out over the Christmas period and has given me lots of advice, some of which I’ve passed on below.  Hopefully the problem will finally be resolved this week. The malicious script has been added somewhere in the database used by WordPress so the code within database needs to be thoroughly examined to find and remove it.

Not being an expert on web or WordPress security, it was soon pointed out to me what could have caused the site to get hacked and these holes have now hopefully been closed, but it’s something anyone with a site built on WordPress needs to be aware of.

1. I had left my login username as ‘admin’ which is an easy entry point for hackers. I’ve now changed my username and my old admin login is now a subscriber to the site.

2. Two plugins have been installed which help to identify security problems and also reject anyone trying to hack in. One of the plugins is WP Security Scan, the other called ‘Bad Behaviour’. The Bad Behaviour plugin helps to block access attempts. I’ve now installed it on this site and if you scroll to the footer of this page, a note will tell you that over 1500 access attempts have been blocked in a week – this shows how prolific hacking is!

3. Make sure your password is a mixture of lower case, upper case and a few unusual characters to make it as secure as possible. I think it’s worth updating the password regularly as well.

4. If you don’t manage your WordPress site yourself, make sure your web developer is aware of the above and actively ensuring your site doesn’t get hacked!

Website hacking is a growing problem and even if you’re not a techie, you need to be aware that it can happen and ensure appropriate steps are taken to ensure it doesn’t. I can tell you from experience that dealing with this sort of thing is a real headache and I don’t want my site to be hacked again!