Twitter is  big news. Unless you’ve been in hiding for the last 2 or 3 years, you’ve probably heard of Twitter one way or another.Whether it’s footballers expressing their dissatisfaction at being dropped from the team, or celebrities like Stephen Fry documenting their everyday lives, much has been written about this latest social media craze.

As with anything that pervades our culture so quickly, before long there were experts telling you that you must be on it and you can make a lot of money out of it. And many people are still wondering “…but how?…”.

I’m experienced in internet marketing, but when it comes to Twitter I’m a dabbler, not an expert. I’ve spent some time on Twitter over the past six months to see what it can do for my business, and I think I can confidently say you should read the rest of this post to see what it might do for you. It definitely deserves some consideration and an open mind.

Twitter won’t redefine your business overnight, and it won’t replace all your other marketing activity either. For the right businesses though, a little bit of time spent on Twitter could be time well spent.

Here’s some of what Twitter can do for you:

Find people talking about what you offer.
Rather than viewing people’s tweets through the Twitter website I prefer to use TweetDeck. Using TweetDeck you can search for specific words and phrases much like you can with a search engine. Only with Twitter you get to see not just search results, but you get to see people’s actual conversations in real time. So you get to see what they are saying about your product or service, the words that they use and all sorts of other useful information that can help with your marketing.

Give you information that helps you run your business.
You might, like me, be a consultant and want to keep up to date with new developments within your profession. On Twitter I’ve managed to find and follow a number of experts in internet marketing and this helps me to keep my knowledge currentand ultimately provide a better service. So it’s not all just aboutfinding customers, it can be about improving your business and developing your skills too.

Get your message out there more widely.
If you’ve got a great offer or sales message on your website or even if you just want to publicise a free newsletter on your site, Twitter gives you another way to get the message out there. A quick tweet with a link to the relevant area of your website doesn’t take a great deal of effort and helps you build a following. Remember to use your main keywords in your tweets and not only will your followers see your tweets but they may attract the attention of other users searching for tweets on your specific subject.

Let you track your competitors.
If Twitter can be effective for your business, the chances are that you may have competitors who’ve got there before you. Twitter is a very transparent service so if a competitor is on there, you can see how many followers they have, and their recent tweets. You can also follow them and see their subsequent tweets, and of course most will link to specific areas of their website. Twitter is one of the first tools that allows you to jump right in to the middle of the conversations that your competitors are having with complete strangers.
So, if acheiving any of these things could help you run your business better, it could be worth you too having a dabble with Twitter. I highly recommend TweetDeck as the best way to find your way around Twitter – it’s free to download, and it’s really easy to use too, with a simple interface involving columns. There’s even an iPhone version that lets you use Twitter on the move.

If you’ve been wondering about Twitter, my advice is to give it a go. Spend no more than half an hour a day on Twitter for a couple of weeks, and you’ll soon have an idea of whether or not it’s going to do anything to boost your business. You have nothing to lose other than a bit of your time.

Related posts:

1. Pay per click advertising – mastering the basics
2. How do you get website visitors?

So in my last two posts I explained what Google AdWords could do for your business, and then some tips on how to set up your campaign. Now we look at some slightly more advanced methods to improve your campaigns as they progress, and get a better understanding of how AdWords actually works and how it decides which ads get seen in the best positions.

Most new AdWords users think “ …but I only pay anything if my ad gets clicked, so it doesn’t really matter if my ads aren’t that great”. True, but Google only makes money when your ad gets clicked, so if it isn’t a good relevant one that gets a lot of clicks, Google won’t like it and it won’t show up in good positions very often, if at all.

How Google’s bidding system works

Let’s say your ad has appeared 1,000 times (known as ‘impressions’) and you have received 10 clicks. That gives you a clickthrough rate (or ‘CTR’) of 1%. Now let’s say you’ve bid a maximum of £2.00 per click. This means for every 100 times your ad appears, you’ll get one click, earning Google £2.00. So, Google will earn an average of 2p each time your ad appears.

And let’s suppose your a competitor has a clickthrough rate of 3% on his ads, but he’s only willing to pay 75p per click. For every 100 times his ads show, it will get 3 clicks, earning Google £2.25, so on average Google earns 2.25p every time your competitor’s ad shows (compared to your 2p). So, despite his lower bid price, Google will favour his ad over yours, and he’ll pay less than you for a better placed ad.

That’s why you need to write really relevant ads that get a high clickthrough rate. There are other factors that Google considers, but this is just a beginner’s guide, so let’s not get too complicated right now. Even with these few basics though, you now already know a lot more than most.

So how do you write ads that get a lot of clicks in Google?

If you’ve followed my earlier posts, by now you should have very specific ads for each keyword in your list, instead of one generic one. Some other quick tips to make your ads even better are:

• Include ‘negative’ keywords – these will stop your ads showing if certain words are keyed in. For example if you’re a hypnotherapist you’d want to exclude people who want to train as a hypnotherapist so you could use ‘course’, ‘train’ and ‘qualification’ as negative keywords. ‘Free’ is pretty well always a great negative keyword in any market.
• Use keywords in the ad – the ad will draw people’s attention to it if they see the keywords they have used actually appear in the ad – especially in the headline.
• Include benefits, not features – say what benefit your product or service delivers to customers, not just what it is. For example, if you’re a garage offering a pick-up service, stress the convenience of it in your ads.
• Use highly relevant landing pages – link your ads to pages that are highly relevant to your ads, as Google will also assess the relevance of the pages that your ads lead to (known as landing pages). If a lot of people click your ads, but leave your site quickly to see the results again, Google will know and it will count against you.
• Split test ads – if you’re not sure what words your customers respond to – do some tests. Google lets you write multiple versions of your ad and split test them to see which gets the most clicks. Test regularly to see what your customers like.

So you should now be able to dabble in AdWords yourself, if you’ve read all 3 of my posts. As your campaigns grow in size and you want better results, or even if you want to free up more of your time to do other things, talk to me about outosurcing your AdWords management.

Related posts:

1. Pay per click advertising – beyond the basics
2. Pay per click advertising – mastering the basics
3. How does a website work?

In my last post I explained to you what a Google AdWords pay per click campaign could do for your business. Now I will start to explain how to set one up. Signing up for an AdWords account is really easy. You simply go to adwords.google.com and follow the instructions. All you need is a credit or debit card to pay for your ads. There is even now a local rate helpline if you’re struggling and need to call Google for help.

So, let’s assume that your AdWords account is set up and you’re ready to set some ads up and start advertising. Where do you begin?

It’s all about the keywords….
Whatever you do, don’t just start writing your ads. Your ads will show when your keywords match what people type in to Google. So, take a step back and take the time to find out what people actually type in, rather than just using the words that you would use, as you may be surprised. With a bit of research, you might just find some keywords that you would never have thought to include.

Incidentally – in the world of pay per click advertising, a keyword is typically a phrase rather than just a word. Very few people search using just one word. If you’re advertising TVs, then “Samsung LCD TV” is still considered a keyword.

So that’s what a keyword is, so how do you find them? Well, there are many ways to research keywords, some free, some not. Probably the best free tool is Google’s Keyword Tool. If you enter a keyword you can see how many people searched Google for that term last month globally, and also within your country. It even suggests some alternative keywords you might want to consider.

Find as many relevant keywords as you can for your product or service, and you’re ready to set up some ads.

Setting up your campaigns.
So you’ve now got a list of keywords. You might only want to advertise one product or service, or you might want to advertise several.  What you need to do now is split your keywords out in to some broad themes. For example if you’re an accountant offering a range of services, you might have some keywords for tax advice, some for audit, and so on.

What many first-time advertisers do is throw all their keywords in to one ad group and show one generic advert to all of them,  and anyone who clicks through will be sent to their homepage. This is the wrong way to do it, as it will drive your costs up and make your ads less effective.

As an example, if someone enters “tax accountant” they should see an ad with “tax accountant” in the headline and be sent to a page about tax accounting if they click through. This might sound pedantic, but it really makes the difference. Google will reward you with lower click costs if your content is highly relevant to your keywords, and users will be more likely to buy or enquire if you give them the information they’re looking for straight away, so you’ll save money and be more likely to make money if you split your adverts out in this way.

Doing it this way takes a lot more time, but trust me, it IS worth it! If you don’t have the time to write dozens of separate ads, then my advice is to just to write ads for one or two products, and write the rest when you get some free time. You’re far more likely to succeed writing one or two good ads for one or two products, than to write one average one-size-fits-all ad for all of your products.

In my next post I’ll explain how Google decides where your ad will be shown and you’ll see why it’s important to structure your campaigns this way.

Related posts:

1. Pay per click advertising – running campaigns that work
2. Pay per click advertising – mastering the basics
3. How do you get website visitors?

If you use the internet regularly, it’s virtually a certainty that you’re familiar with pay per click advertising, and in particular Google’s AdWords platform. When you key a search term in to Google, a results page appears, and the ads appear as ‘sponsored links’ alongside the search results.

AdWords has been around now since 2002, but if you’ve never advertised through it, you might not be aware of just what it could do for your business, and you may be surprised. Here are the basics of what it could do for your business, and in later posts I will explain how you achieve them.

• Getting traffic quickly – you can set up an account with Google in minutes using a credit card and have your ads running in a few more minutes. It’s advisable to take a little while longer over it than that, as you’ll see in later posts, but it’s still much quicker, cheaper and easier than say advertising in a magazine.
• Precise targeting – unlike an ad or renting a mailing list, AdWords brings people to your site, right at the point that they are looking for what you have to offer. Of course there will be a few people using the wrong search term and even the odd snooping competitor, but most people will be interested in what you have to offer, which can’t be said of many offline marketing techniques.
• Flexibility – if you think that AdWords won’t work for your business you may be surprised. It’s more flexible than ever now to meet the needs of different businesses. It now allows you to target people from very specific locations (even down to street level if you so wish), and you can advertise any time you want (for example you might only want to advertise during your office hours) and you can turn your ads on or off at any time if you need to.
• Low risk – while many marketing techniques are expensive and very much “all or nothing”, AdWords gives you the opportunity to test things very cheaply and quickly to see what sort of response it gets.
• Visibility of results - with AdWords you know what you have spent and how many site visits you have got in return.

AdWords now makes it possible for even the smallest of businesses with very little marketing budget to get potential customers to their website and to compete against competitors with larger budgets.

It’s not all plain sailing though. AdWords can become expensive and ineffective if you’re not careful, so see my next post for some common mistakes and how to avoid them.

Related posts:

1. Pay per click advertising – beyond the basics
2. Pay per click advertising – running campaigns that work
3. What exactly is the point of Twitter?

Blogging is not new but can still offer great benefits to your business and your website. Even as more and more social media tools emerge, blogging is still holding its own as a very worthwhile addition to your marketing efforts, and the benefits can be huge.

Here are the greatest benefits (in my opinion) of blogging for your business:

1. Adding fresh content – if your website stays exactly the same for months or even years on end, nobody will bother coming back after a while. Blogging is a great opportunity to add new, relevant topical content. New content will encourage people to keep coming back and will also help boost your search engine rankings, which in the long term will help bring new people in too.

 

2. Becoming an authority – if you want to stand out from your competition it’s great to try and position yourself as an authority on your chosen topic or area of expertise. Whilst your main website will explain to people what you do, a blog can add a bit of personality and really give potential clients a flavour of how you think and work and what your opinions are. It can even help your reputation spread further by encouraging word of mouth. In most professions, you’ll probably find that there are topical trends and issues that you can find to blog about and explain to potential customers what the implications are for them. For example, if you’re an accountant it’s great to explain what the latest budget announcement, or a new piece of legislation will mean to your target market, or even remind them of a looming tax deadline. Adding personality to your site can make your business less price sensitive. If you help people understand things that are important to them, they will come to you first, rather than shopping around for a cheaper supplier.

 

3. Building a dialogue - marketing is all about giving customers what they want. And you’ll never truly know what they want without paying a lot of attention to them and ideally asking them what they want. Writing a blog can be a great way to build dialogue with actual and potential customers.  By allowing them to post comments on your blog you can find out what they think and maybe even why they don’t buy from you currently. Some might challenge your views, but at least you will get a chance to give your side of the argument back in response, or in some cases they could make a valid comment that you can use to improve your business.  Either way, comments are something to be encouraged, and not something to be afraid of. Potential customers might even be impressed with the way you respond off the cuff to a comment from another reader.  If however you’re really worried about negative comments you can easily set your blog so that you get to see all comments and approve them before they appear on your site.

These are just some of the business benefits of blogging, and there are many more, so please post a comment if there are any others you want to share. I hope you’ll agree the above benefits are ones that would be good for pretty well any business.

If you want a blog setting up, contact me and I’ll be happy to talk you through your options. It’s really quick, easy and affordable to do.

Related posts:

1. How do you get website visitors?
2. How does a website work? (part 2)
3. Pay per click advertising – mastering the basics

So let’s assume you have a live website. However good it may be, you need people to find it – that’s always been blindingly obvious since the internet began.

How you find visitors though, is the difficult bit. There are more ways of getting website traffic nowadays than ever. That’s a great opportunity, but also a big problem. We humans are pre-programmed to get confused when we get overwhelmed by too much choice.

There are so many ways to get traffic to your site these days, that many people don’t know where to start – so….they don’t! They spend a lot of time wondering where to start but never really get started. Or, they start something, don’t get instant results and move on to the next thing, then the next thing and then another thing. None of them work of course because they don’t stick at them long enough.

This last approach is bad because most of the ways to get traffic are “slow burners” which will take a while to develop and a bit of patience and tenacity is required. It’s much better to pick one or two things, and stick at them.

Here, in no particular order are some of the main ways to get traffic to your site.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

To get your website on the first page of results you first need to consider what words your potential customers use when they search for your product or service. You then need to build your website in a way that makes it easy for the search engines to find it, and keep adding fresh content regularly. There are a million and one other things to consider too, as SEO is very complex. If you want to know more, keep following my blog, as I’ll be covering the basics of SEO in a post in the coming weeks.

Social Media 

Social media on its own is becoming a huge, diverse discipline – far too big for me to explain fully in one paragraph! Social media are not just for teenagers – they can help your business too. To keep this post fairly short, I’ll just talk about two – blogging and Twitter. Setting up a blog is really cheap and easy – even if you want your own domain name and a decent looking site. It gives you a way to spread your opinion and become a bit of an authority in your marketplace. Combining your blog with a Twitter account, you can then let Twitter users know when you’re adding a new blog post. By making sure that your “tweet” uses keywords that people are likely to search on, you will show up when people search Twitter for information on the service you offer. I release a new tweet automatically each time I update this blog.

Article directories

Writing articles is a great way to show your expertise. In fact you may even already have articles that you’ve written for your target audience or trade press. Adding them to an article directory is a great way of getting your name out there, and also getting links to your site (which can be great for SEO as long as the site they are on is a respectable one). There are many article directories out there such as EZine Articles .

Forum comments

Whatever you sell, and whoever your customers are, there is probably some sort of an online forum or chatroom where they gather. Search for them online, and get yourself on there and join in their conversations. Don’t bowl in with a blatant sales pitch or you will put people off, but try and help them with no direct expectation of gain, and you will find that people warm to you more. Remember to include a link to your site in your signature so people know where to find you. Commenting on forums is great because it puts you in touch with a very targeted, specific audience and your comments will probably stay there for a very long time.

Blog comments

As with forums above, there may also be blogs that your target audience read, which you can easily find online and comment on. The same rules apply – be subtle and add something of value to the conversation.

Pay-per-click advertising

If you absolutely need quality traffic fast, this is just about the only way to go. Google AdWords is great because it can be set up in minutes and you can target ads to people searching for what you offer. You can even schedule your ads to run during certain times of day (such as your office hours) within certain geographic areas (eg within 10 miles of your office or within the UK only) and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. However, running AdWords ads is easy to get wrong, so it pays to learn the basics first. I highly recommend Perry Marshall’s free 5-day email course as a starting point. I am now a qualified Google AdWords professional and I started off learning AdWords through Perry’s book and the information on his website. If you’d like me to manage your AdWords account, then contact me for more information.

So, just to recap – getting website traffic takes time, so be patient and stick with one or two things and get all the good advice you can, and be wary of any scams that claim to guarantee you page one rankings on Google within days. It’s probably too good to be true.

These are just a few simple ways of getting traffic to your site. If you want to know more about any of the things I’ve mentioned above, even if you want to know about some good free resources, just drop me a line or add a comment suggesting things you’d like me to blog about in future.

Related posts:

1. How does blogging benefit your business?
2. What exactly is the point of Twitter?
3. How does a website work? (part 2)

In my first post I explained to you how a website is not all that different really from a normal document or set of documents.

As promised, in my second post I’ll explain briefly how you make web pages and get them on to a live website for all the world to see. Let’s assume you’ve now got a domain name and some server space and that they’re live and ready to use.

When you key your web address in to a browser, you’ll likely see a ‘holding page’ from your web hosts. This is a temporary page saying something like ‘one of our clients has registered this domain’. When you create your site, this will disappear.

So to get your site built and live you need to do two things:

• Build some web pages
• Copy them to your web server so people can view them

There are two main ways to achieve this:

• Buy a piece of software for creating page layouts such as DreamWeaver and use it to build web pages on your own computer. Then when you’re happy with them, upload the pages to your web server.
• Or instead you could use a Content Management System (CMS). Instead of building the pages on your computer, then uploading them, this is a piece of software that you upload to your web server, which then allows you to build and edit your own site.Best of all you can log in to your site and do this from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection.

So which is the best approach? Well that all depends on your circumstances.

DreamWeaver is a great piece of software giving you virtually endless possibilities. It’s not cheap though, and it does take a lot of learning, but professional web designers who’ve designed sites with it for years, swear by it. So if you have enough cash to hire a professional web designer and you really need a great looking site and don’t have the time to build one yourself, that may be the best option for you. They may well build your site using DreamWeaver.

If you’re more of a beginner though, using a CMS can be a better option. For this site, and for clients, I tend to use WordPress. Although it doesn’t have the capabailities of DreamWeaver, it is easier to learn and use relatively quickly. And there’s another great thing about WordPress – it’s totally free.

So you simply buy a hosting package and a domain name, and get WordPress uploaded to your server (most hosts will even do this for you), and you can then use WordPress to build your site from scratch, and then add, delete and edit your pages. You can even include a blog within your site.  WordPress actually is a piece of blog software that’s evolved so far  you can now build an entire website with it, so the blog capabilities of it are great.

You can even, reasonably easily add photos from your computer and include them within specific pages or blog posts. The options for layout are a bit more limited than with DreamWeaver, but it’s still easy to design a great looking site cheaply.

And WordPress is not the only free CMS – there are others like Joomla! and Drupal. I’ve never used Joomla, but I’m learning Drupal at the moment, and so far I’m really impressed with it.

So, that gives you a rough idea of what it takes to build a simple website or blog. As you can hopefully now see, it needn’t be massively complicated or expensive to get a decent looking site produced.

Related posts:

1. How does a website work?
2. How do you get website visitors?
3. How does blogging benefit your business?

My intention for this site is to help non-technical people to get their head round internet marketing. So it makes sense to start with something really basic – how does a website work?

If you’ve never built one, or had one built for you, you might feel quite bemused by websites. The truth is though, if you can use a computer and create and save files on it, you’re well on your way to understanding how a website works.

That’s because a website is nothing more than a series of files linked together. In reality, each page (even on a big complex, nice-looking website) is just a simple file, not much more complex than a Word document or an Excel sheet.

Granted, a web page has some differences, such as:

• A Word document is normally only viewed by you and selected others, whereas a web page is generally free for anyone to view over the internet
• A web page links to other pages using hypertext – better known simply as links – which you don’t normally do with Word documents. (In actual fact you can link Word and Excel documents this way, but you rarely see it done)
• Web pages typically follow a design template, so all pages on a site tend to look similar with standardised menus etc

These differences are minor though, so remember that a web page is in essence,  just a file, and don’t let any web experts try to let you believe otherwise.

So let’s think again about that Word document on your PC – what else would you do with it? Well, to create it properly you will have to give it a filename. Then, you save it somewhere – could be a drive on your computer, could be a CD or a USB drive.

With a website, you have to give that a file name too. The only difference is that because it’s shared publicly, you have to give it a unique name, to avoid people visiting the wrong site. That’s why domain names, which are basically just a filename for a website, have to be bought and reserved and only used once.

Whereas you might save a Word document to the hard drive of your computer, a website needs to be viewable by people all over the world. So, it has to go on a server. In layman’s terms a server is simply a computer that serves up the pages to people who go to your website. It’s not quite like your computer because it will always be switched on and can be accessed by anyone, which your computer can’t (strictly speaking you can turn your own computer in to a server to be accessed remotely by other computers, but it’s not really advisable, or necessary).

Buying some space on a server to host your website is really easy and affordable. Generally you will buy your domain at the same time from the same company. I use justhost for this, but there are loads of hosting companies out there.

So as you can hopefully now see, a website is not as far removed from a normal document on your PC, as you might have thought. And now you’ve probably got a reasonable understanding of the relationship between your website, the domain and the server and what each term means.

So, that’s the basics, but how do you get your website built, and put on to a server? There are various options here, so stay tuned for my next post where I will explain the basic options.

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Related posts:

1. How does a website work? (part 2)
2. How do you get website visitors?
3. Pay per click advertising – running campaigns that work