Police chase ferrari at 139mph for 6 miles without idetnitfying themselves

OK, here is a moral dilema for you. A wealthy doctor buys a Ferrari, nothing wrong with that, lots of doctors prbably own Ferrari’s. Then in April 2009 he is seen doing 90 miles per hour on the A23 by a policeman in an unmarked police car. The Policeman catches up with the good doctor but the doctor, on noticing he is now being closely followed by another high powered vehicle speeds up in attempt to lose the tail.

The police continue to tail the Ferrari closely over the next 6 miles as it speeds up to 139mph, and only then identifies itself as an unmarked police car.

The doctor immediately pulls over and gets a speeding ticket.

In court the doctor is defended by specialist speeding defence solicitor, Chris Sweetman, who correctly points out that the doctor would not have driven his Ferrari at 139mph had he not been in fear of being hijacked by someone chasing him in a high powered sports car. 

The doctor gets off with a bit of a fine and three points. I don’t know about you but I know who I’ll be calling the next time I get done for speeding.

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Leadbank – concentrate on lead generation not traffic generation

Leadbank Corporate are an online marketing company that specialise in generating search engine rankings for the SME sector, and in that regard they are only one of hundreds of optimisation companies up and down the country doing the same thing.

However, where Leadbank Corporate differ from most companies is in their approach. Whereas most SEO companies benchmark their success on how much additional traffic they are generating through better ranking,  Leadbank have added a factor all too often ignored by smaller companies; how many “Leads” are being generated.

For this I applaud them. Anyone can set up a pay per click campaign and drive traffic to a site but doing this without first analysing how the site deals with its visitors is like opening a new store on Oxford Street without first training the staff.

Every site will have a specific objective for existing whether its collecting enquiries, downloading songs or selling widgets and its ability to convert the traffic generated by its rankings on the major search engines is as important as the traffic itself. One could argue that it is more important as some of the biggest casualties in the latest recession had websites that were receiving hundreds of thousands of visitors every month and folded because they could not convert that traffic into sales.

Another area where Leadbank are different is in their approach to non-buyers. The 98% of visitors to your site that have a good look around and then leave. It is a well known fact that visitors seldon purchase on their first visit to a site and so it is vital to include data capture points around your site to encourage visitors to leave their details. Leadank use free vouchers to encourage visitors to leave their details and then entice them back through email marketing.

Why social media sites are not a free lunch

Facebook now has 150,000,000 members, and I know that there are bound to be a few who decided to join and then never went back but I’m struggling to think of any other organisation in the world with more members.

Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Linkedin and the multitude of other sites that we are told you must be using or your business will get left behind have experienced phenomenal growth in the last couple of years, as has the number of people who pronounce themselves social media consultants.

Most of the business hype around social media surrounds the fact that you can now advertise on these sites and with their advanced profiling you can pin point your target audience.  But the real reason why all businesses should be taking notice of social media sites is that they leverage the number one marketing tool in the world, “word of mouth”.

I know its a bit of a vague statistic but I heard that almost half of all business is done as a direct result of a recommendation, and I can believe that, as almost all my business comes from existing customers and partners recommending me. Social media allows people who know you to recommend you, that’s it! But they rarely do it unprompted.

So the question is do you really need a social media consultant to tell you how to ask your customer and partners to recommend you? No. You need a fourteen year old to show you how to open a facebook account, create a page to promote what you do and then get every single one of your customers, friends and partners to become a fan of your business. It isn’t easy but then nothing that works ever is. And if that doesn’t bring in new business then your problems are much bigger than you think.�

Watch out for the Google external key word tool.

I recently had a client who was using Google’s external key word tool to decide which key phrases he wanted to optimise his site for. The external key word tool is an excellent way to estimate traffic for payper click purposes but it has its limitations in SEO.

Probably the biggest is the fact that numbers for one and two word key phrases include a percentage of all other key phrases that also include those words.

For example, a search for the key word cushion comes back with 450,000 searches for September, with the second most popular key phrase being cushion covers with only 90,000 searches. However, Google admits that the first figure includes a percentage of the second figure, and the third and so on. It does not say what the percentage is but it does throw doubts over using this tool.

If you’re looking for accurate numbers try word tracker instead, it costs a bit but its worth it.  �

Web 2.0 vs Npower

I don’t normally give recommendations on my Blog but I am reading a book at the moment that deserves a mention. Its called Groundswell and if you have not read it yet and your serious about promoting your business on the web, then I suggest you give it a try.

It does throw up more questions than it answers as all good books should and the one that struck me whilst I read it on a flight out to France for a family wedding this weekend was this. Can we use social networking to save money? Not make money, save money.

There are literally thousands of comparison websites out there that offer you the ability to potentially save you money but I don’t use them. Why? Because its too much like hard work and I have no time for it.

Having said that if I could join a group on a social networking site that when it got to a million people we would all agree to change our gas supplier to whoever offered the best deal I would join in a heart beat.

Now, it would mean changing the whole charging system for gas because I for one have no idea how to work out my bill. I know the first so many kilowatts are charged at one rate and the rest at another. And just to confuse me even more you have to divide the whole thing by how many times you go to the toilet to get a number you can accurately compare with another company but there has to be a better way.

Why can’t I have an online calculator that when I put a figure in it calculates how much I have spent since my last bill even if it was estimated. I set up an online account with Npower and all I got was an electronic version of my bill. Big Deal.

Do you know if we got one thousand people with a similar household to me signed up our combined spending on gas and electricity would be approximately £1.5 million. One million of us would generate a combined total of £1.5 billion.

So, I’m starting a list. A list of people who, on their own have no power at all against the energy suppliers but when part of a mass of people with a desire for a better deal have plenty.

Corporate Blogging is dead boring!

Foresters Laura Ramos says “Corporate bloggers (just) yak away about their companies and products.” Too be honest she is right but how should you use your blog.

Here are a few tips from  John Dragoon, CMO at Novell, who was praised by Forrester for his authentic blog voice:

1. Offer inside scoops and viewpoints. “As an executive, you have a privileged view inside your company,” says Dragoon. “I try to write and share something unique that readers wouldn’t get through other channels of communication.”
2. Don’t get huffy about negativity. “Don’t feel that you have to respond to or even publish overly negative comments or feedback,” he says.
3. Be available. “I very often respond directly to folks who post to my blog via email and not through the blog itself,” he reports. “They are very often surprised that I take the time to do that.”
4. The Po!nt: Relax. Be yourself in your next post. Your own unique perspective just might get your company noticed.

I agree that you shouldn’t use your blog to sell your products and services and Mr Dragoon makes a valuable point. So, in the spirit of openess and honesty I apologise for not updating my blog since may and promise to be better in future.

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Outsourced website marketing

Marketing your website, which means maintaining a steady flow of quality traffic, involves ensuring that it is full of up to date, compelling, material that keeps your visitors happy enough to come back again and again and, if your very lucky, spread the word amongst friends and colleagues.

 Sounds simple enough until you try it. Procrastination is the thief of time and this is no better illustrated than in the countless websites I have visited that have not been updated for months, sometimes even years.  Next time you’re looking at a website try and find something current, a piece of news, a press release, a competition with an end date that is still in the future. You won’t be surprised to find very little up to date content, especially on websites owned by small companies.

Why is this? Every small businessman I know understands the importance of a strong presence on the Internet, so why do they let the grass grow so long, figuratively speaking? Mainly because they’ve got more pressing things do to. Steven Covey would say that, keeping your website up to date is important but not urgent, because if it was urgent you would be doing it. If I asked you whether you would to update your blog, or website, write the odd press release or create an email newsletter to update your customers, you would say yes, of course you would.

You could employ someone to do it, but what would they do for the other 15 working days of the month, cost you money mainly. Well, why not outsource it, employ someone a couple of days a month, one day to research what you are going to do, and one day doing it. Sounds too good to be true? well it isn’t.

I have a client who owns a few small hotels scattering around the country. All the hotel managers have to do in order to keep the traffic rolling in to their website is make sure they keep three up to date offers on the home page, send out one email newsletter a month to their customers, create a press release and release it through an online newswire service, add at least one entry to their blog each month, spend an hour optimising their local pay per click campaign, and get three local businesses to add a link from their website to the hotels. Sounds simple enough but I can’t remember that last time one of the hotels completed every task. Some off them haven’t sent a newsletter out all year, even though they have a ready made template to use and helpline in case they get stuck. Their websites are still advertising Valentines Day offers, and I bet they don’t serve half the things in the restaurant that are on the menu on the site.

An out of date website is a crime. Would you send out last year’s brochure and price list? of course not.   

Design or Build – which costs more?

Here’s a question that has troubled me for years. I believe that web design companies don’t charge enough for design and too much for build.

Many traditional web design companies charge using the same template as builders and architects, which is totally wrong. Everytime I saw a job go over budget it was always in the areas of design and project management, because the client was always changing their mind and always on the phone.

That was until the design was complete, then we heard nothing until the website was complete and in test mode, when, surprise surprise the client had found five design issues that he wanted to change.

Just to put this into perspective I was recently looking for an outsourcing company that could handle building CSS templates from PNG designs. I found one in America that would do it for nothing, well almost.

No you are not halucinating, that really does say build a site for $153. However, when I checked out how much it would cost to get their sister company to design the site, I got the shock of my life.

So, for all those web design companies out there still costing on a per page basis.

Think again because your losing your shirt. 

Has Google devalued social media links?

I’ve been hearing a lot recently about Google devaluing the weight of certain links. In particular, any links that it finds in blogs, directories or social media sites. The main reason for this chatter is that these types of links are pretty easy to get, and the purists out there believe that you should actually spill blood when optimising your site. So, is this true or not because it really doesn’t sit right with me.

Why would Google spend so much time and effort coming up with a unique way of valuing links and then throw in a blanket policy for certain sites. Read the rest of this entry »

Seven free web services that all small businesses should use

Let’s say you run a small shop in a provincial town. You may or may not have a website but you firmly believe that the web isn’t for your business. How wrong can you be? But if you do feel like this its probably because you’ve been fleeced by a local web design firm, who built you a site that quickly went out of date with no way of updating it and its been sitting there for the last two years directing visitors to somewhere you left six months  ago. If this is the case you’re not likely to want to throw more money at the internet and so here are seven reasons why you should not have to. Well not until you’ve converted generated enough money to change your mind on what the internet can offer. Read the rest of this entry »