Morley Falling out of a Tree from Gregory Cromwell on Vimeo.

There are many reasons for this but the thing it boils down to most often is that their website/shopping cart does not generate enough visits to find consumers that are interested in what they are selling. Using a bricks and mortar metaphor if your had a store that was boarded up and had a chain on it would you expect to make many sales? No.

The same goes for selling online. You need people to come into your online shop and have a look. The way they are going to find you is most likely via search. The question is are people searching for what you have? Here is a list of the most popular shopping search words.

Chart: Top Google Ecommerce Searches

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If you are not lucky enough to be selling shoes or boots what does this chart say? One thing that stands out is Ebay. If you want to get a sense of your selling ability online for anything then having a go at ebay is essential. It gives you a good idea of what people are willing to pay (or not) for the product you have.

Let’s hope for a better success ratio of selling things online for our clients in 2010. One of the ways we will make sure this happens is that we will ensure our clients to a thorough job at establishing and working with us to get a strong search strategy in place from the start.

One of the first things you do in the digital world is to do an internet search for people, businesses, services or whatever you need to write about. Then you can madly copy and paste them onto a document and before you  know it you have page after page of bla after bla and then you start to edit it to suit your needs. After working up a sweat you find yourself with a couple hundred plagarised words that at first read make you feel like the deed is done but when you read them again they sound like the worst re-run ever. Believe me I have done this so many times and have the gigs on my hard drive to prove it.

Today I tried something different when Andrew Bleakley reminded me that I was responsible for writing an About us, about us for our new website and other social media related activities. After cutting and pasting the best words from the best advertising and digital design sites I could find, not to mention cursing flash sites that you can’t cut and paste from it came to me. Ironically it came to me when I was writing down, yes writing and I was even using a fountain pen. These need to be my words: Fresh from my cranium and unique to our team and what we do. So without further a do, here is what I have come up with about us.

ABOUT US

Bush Branding & Marketing is an independent, full service, digital creative agency. Our team members were birthed in the 60s, 70s and 80’s so we know our ways around the traditional and digital world. We offer you our international experience in design, development and promotion. What sets us apart is our entrepreneurial spirit and work ethic. Our founder has started up and continues to manage a handful of businesses that keeps our team busy and on our toes when it comes to delivering measurable results. We are really good at coming up with ideas that will take flight like a feather. On the other hand we know how to push the back end of an elephant up a steep hill if that’s what it takes to get the job done.

Bush Marketing has not won any awards and it never will. We applaud agencies that have the time and money to enter the never ending list of award shows; however, when our days and nights are done we can think of much better ways to have fun like thinking of new ways to grow the brands in our care (especially our own).

The internet has changed all this. As it seems to do quite often. Let me put this question to you–if you are interested in buying or renting a home how would you find one? It’s not a long shot to predict that at some point in time you will be on the internet looking at real estate sites or real estate agent sites to check out prices, pictures and features of prospective dream homes.

When we first put our property on the market our agent let us know that there are 3 p’s to successfully selling property: price, promotion and presentation. Last week we took care of price with an extreme reduction and presentation (sadly we had to give our tenants notice so we could present the property vacant). This week we are doing our part with promotion.

Promotion online really comes down to pictures. Plenty of pictures to capture the key selling features of your property. Another P-get a professional photographer if you really want to let your home and land shine. We have had some professional shots done but we also wanted to show people how much hard work (and hard cash) we have spent to get our 10 acres that were formally camphor and noxious weed infested to the pretty paddocks they are now. An hour of reviewing 1000’s of pictures and I selected about 100 and have uploaded them to flickr. Living by the less is more motto Alison is helping me cull them down to a dozen of the best shots for our agent to review and use. Being impetuous I can’t wait for the selects and want to share all of my picks using flickr slideshow. Here we go. If you have sometime help us out and comment on the pictures that stand out to you.

It’s hard for me as an apple mac user and an advocate of open source everythingness to comprehend why any organisation, person and especially government would use Internet Explorer. It would be like taking the tyres off your car and replacing them with square pieces of stone to go from Firefox or my new love Chrome to Microsoft’s clunky old browser.

The digital age is well and truly upon us and people will no doubt go to panic stations about this. With any luck this will spur people on to looking at open source alternatives to expensive, easy to hack and likely to attract attack software. There is no real need to panic unless you are the sort of person who likes to send cash in the mail in an unlicked envelope. Stop using Internet Explorer and look download for free a superior alternative. Taste the goodness of open source.

Please feel free to contact Andrew Bleakley and Greg Cromwell if you have any questions about technology, the internet and life’s bigger questions (perhaps we will need to meet over a beer for this one)

Useful Links from Andrew

So why is there so much mystery and controversy surrounding the field of Search Engine Optimisation ?

Two reasons.
Firstly, it suits incompetent companies to be vague and non-committal. It provides them a buffer against expectation and performance.
Secondly, most people take it as a personal afront if they do not appear at the top of the search results. They see it as a reflection of them and there business and get awfully defensive when they perceive themselves poorly scored.

As professional (and very qualified) internet marketer’s Greg and myself have worked hard over the years to develop a systematic approach to achieving solid rankings and maintaining them.

We start every ranking and traffic project with a detailed breakdown of required tasks and expected outcomes. We will ensure you are fully aware of each group of tasks (link building, content creation and modification) and not only how long it will take, but how long it will take until you see results.

We have added the cartoon below not only because it makes us smile, but because hopefully it will serve as a reminder that unless your search engine team provide you with a clear outline and clearly defined results they are probably best ignored.

One last point (and the answer to a question I am asked almost every single day). If you get emailed an offer to boost your website rankings please ignore it, regardless of how good it sounds. A reputable company will contact you personally – no good ever comes from responding to SPAM.

I hope you enjoy watching it. Time for me to get to work sending out our next Bush Telegraph wishing you all the best for the holiday season. If you have not signed up for our newsletter please do and I would love to hear back from you if you think our next newsletter has some fun in it.

In North America we will be planting trees native to the endangered Carolinian Zone which lies south of an imaginary line between Grand Bend on Lake Huron and Toronto on Lake Ontario. “Carolinian” is a name coined by early botanists, who observed that hardwood forests in southwestern Ontario share many characteristics with forests as far south as the Carolinas. Forests in Ontario’s Carolinian Zone are enriched by trees having a strong southern affinity, such as tulip, sassafras, Kentucky coffee, cucumber magnolia, black gum, and papaw. Carolinian forest is one of Canada’s most threatened habitats.

In Australia native rainforest trees are being planted in an area known as the Big Scrub. The Big Scrub Rainforest was once Australia’s biggest subtropical rainforest covering over 75,000 hectares. Sadly 99% of this area has now been cleared.

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For more information on our annual client party visit http://www.bushmarketing.com/100mile.html