The video below is Commander Chris Hadfield of the international space station doing a version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity & includes some majestic shots of our little planet just to remind us how insignificant we really are. It’s a beautifully done video, a great song & a great send off from a man who’s time as commander of the ISS will have peaked peoples interest in science & space at a time where funding for such projects is being slashed.  Enjoy.

Ground control to Major Tom, lock your Soyuz hatch and put your helmet on

Dara O Briain’s Tribute To Commander Chris Hadfield

Content marketing is a great way to build traffic to your site & increase your search engine rankings. Producing quality content that is linked to & shared around the web can also build your businesses reputation. If done properly, it is regarded as one of the best ways to build trust among clients and nurture leads.

Another great way of attracting and engaging customers is through social media websites like Facebook and Twitter. Combining the power of both Content Marketing & Social Media can result in increased website traffic & leads.

Here are a few tips on how to use the combined power of content marketing and social media platforms to attract customers and generate traffic.

Establish your goal

When posting your content, you ought to have a clear goal in your mind; you must establish what you want to gain from that post. Is your post aimed at getting leads?  Is it about enhancing Google ranking? Or, just for the sake of entertainment?

Whatever the objective, you must be clear about it, so that when writing the content, you stay focused on your goal. This will ensure your content achieves that purpose.

Write relevant to your audience

Knowing who you are writing for is important for creating quality content which is relatable to your potential customers. Learn about and research your audience so that you can pick a topic to write about. You can even check what other content has been posted for the niche you are aiming to target; this will help you stay informed about the interests of the people who are posting for.

Never write too technical

Fill your content with too many technical details or jargon and your audience will be turned off forever. Remember that you are posting for humans; try to adopt conversational tone which is compelling yet light and amiable. Of course, you can fill in important and basic technical details to show your grip on the subject, but be sure it is easy to read and understand. Your content will only go viral on Facebook or Twitter if majority of your audience are able to understand it.

Wide publishing

Although publishing your content where you know your target audience reads most of its content is crucial, this does not mean you should post to those platforms only. Think bigger and post to as many relevant areas as you can. This will enhance your online presence and may get you added traffic and audience. Article directories, wiki sites &  guest blogging are just a few ways you can share your content.

Get creative

Use multimedia to make your content interesting and creative. People today often get tired of reading lengthy posts and short breaks in the form of relevant pictures or videos refresh their mind and your post purpose as well. Creating high quality content means that your content should be

• Interesting
• Error free
• Pure information
• Reader friendly
• Purpose oriented
• Broken down into small paragraphs or bullet points

Along with these basic yet vital tips, you can also use your own techniques which you think would help you. It is always healthy to be able to innovate, analyze and propose solutions for yourself and your audience.

Defining one SEO strategy that works as a standard technique for all websites is not possible as every website has a different scenarios & levels of optimisation and hence, it requires strategies to deal with issues specific to that website.

In addition to this, search engine optimization is not a one time job,  it’s a continuous process and requires monitoring, upgrading, content creation & link building.

Website owners who think doing  SEO as a once off will bring traffic and stable high rankings may see traffic for a while but will inevitably end up losing traffic & natural rankings. For business websites, this could mean disaster.

However, there are certain free SEO tools which you can to help your websites ranking. And, if you are serious about using your businesses website to generate traffic, leads & sales you can use these tools to identify the area’s of your website that need work (On-Page Optimisation) before doing off-page optimization. (Link Building)

1. Google Webmaster Tools

Whether you are a beginner or a pro, you must sign up with Google Webmaster Tools. It’s  free and really helpful in giving an overview of your overall site performance.

It also allows you to check your site’s indexing, sitemap, keyword clicks, and inbound links as well as outbound links & the keywords being searched that are bring people to your businesses website.

In addition to this, the Google Webmaster Tools also identifies issues and problems, like duplicate Meta tags, broken links and crawl errors, which hinder website’s ranking and performance. Further, it provides a detailed analysis on every problem and suggests a solution as well. Google Webmaster Tools is a comprehensive SEO tool & is something everyone with a website should be using if getting traffic from is something they want.

2. BrowSEO

Sometimes even if you have a brilliant webpage full of information, useful links and easy navigation and everything, your webpage does not rank that well. When aiming to enhance your search engine ranking, two aspects are important to consider; firstly, how users see your webpage and secondly, how search engines see your webpage. Although a user oriented webpage is bound to get organic ranking and traffic, search engines should be able to see this as well. For this, webmasters need to know how the search engine spiders perceive their website.

BrowSEO lets you see how your page appears to the search engine spiders. The tool is fairly straightforward to use. Just enter the URL of your website and click the browse button. A detailed analysis will be displayed.

3. HubSpot Marketing grader

One of the key aspects of a successful website is an effective marketing campaign. The HubSpot Marketing Grader is a website audit tool which analyses your website with regards to marketing. This tool uses social signals to grade website’s marketing performance. It also divides several SEO factors in three categories and awards grading accordingly.

Although there are many SEO tools available, there are hardly any good ones which are free as well but the Hubspot Marketing Grader & BrowSEO are very useful & Google Webmaster Tools is required.

Facebook is the most powerful social networking site available on the internet today with over a billion users. With this massive user base, Facebook recently launched ‘Facebook Gifts’ which allows users to give a gift to another friend on family member on Facebook. The giving of the gift appears as another message on the receivers Facebook page. This message is visible to all the friends of the receiver which you can imagine in a birthday, wedding or any other gift giving situation will influence others to purchase gifts for the receiver.

So giving a gift has changed from a private transaction between two individuals to a public and visible operation. The gifts are currently not very lavish and range from iTunes Gift cards to champagne. With this the era of Digital Social Visibility our gifting will now being broadcast to countless others who are known to us as well as a strangers.

In the past the giver of the gift tended to influence other passive observers by his gift. But now, since gifting is public, the giver is now aware that his gift will be observed by a significant number of people and therefore takes more care about the actual gift. Economist, Thorsten Veblen, says that we try to advertise our economic power by the purchases we make, especially luxury items, so as to gain social status. Veblen wrote his theory of ‘conspicuous consumption’ over a century back when there was limited public visibility of one’s actions. But now, with the availability of social media, it is very easy and, therefore, Veblen’s assessment is coming to pass more obviously.

While Facebook guarantees a large audience to witness the giving of gifts, it cannot advise you about the composition of this audience. For example, a gift given by a supervisor to an employee on Facebook may have been done with good intentions. But one of the audiences could be the employee’s spouse or his own, who may not view the transaction in the same positive light. This difference between our ‘imagined audience’ and the actual one can lead to conflicts. Digital social visibility can be a boon as well as a danger and one needs to learn how to manage this successfully.

People now are starting to pay more attention to Facebook  ‘likes’ and other such positive responses from the audience to judge the response to their actions. This means that they tend to choose items for which they may get favourable responses. These are new and exciting vistas for businesses to explore. This will help them understand how they should present the gift choices and also try to judge the degree of influence the gift attains. They need to focus more and more on the sharing of users and how publicity impacts this.

While all this is exciting for the world of business, each of us is also subtly being manipulated and we will increasingly make public choices such as the restaurants we go to or the concerts we choose to attend because of the digital image we want others to see and not choose these because we want to do so.

Google is by far the most popular search engine available today and has been so for many years. Google has been studying the search patterns of people and used that to create a very powerful personal assistant called Google Now for the Android and IOS platforms.

Google Now was named the “Innovation of the Year” 2012 by Popular Science. It analyses the common operations that the user does and presents this information in the form of cards. There are many functions but the 10 Things you can do with Google Now you might not know about are listed below.

1. Next Appointment – busy executives can load their calendar with their various meetings just like a typical calendar function. However, Google Now, will pop up a card with a map showing the location and the time to be taken to get there. It incorporates the latest traffic information and factors in delays. The same feature is useful for recreational events like restaurant dinners, concerts, plays, and movies are booked through Fandango.

2. Flights – Google Now keeps track of bookings made through Gmail and warns about flight delays, if any. Another related feature can display the boarding card, currently available only for United Airlines, for check in.

3. Note to Self – this is a powerful feature in which the user to can dictate a memo to himself by saying the words ‘Note to Self’ followed by the memo. Google Now will convert this to text and automatically send an email message with the text and the audio file.

4. Translate – when the executive is abroad, he can find out translation into the local language.

5. Weather – by utilising the current location, Google Now will show the weather at home, workplace and the place you intend to be in shortly.

6. Breaking News – all developing stories as well as Public Alerts are popped up as cards but filtered based on the user’s interest.

7. Research Topic – Google Now studies the topics the user generally searches and, in anticipation, suggests topics that may be of interest. If a trip is booked, Google Now may suggest hotels, tourist spots and routes. When away from home, it uses the current location to suggest various entertainment options such as movies, restaurants and places to visit.

8. Sports – everyone, including busy executives, follows some sport or the other and Google Now keeps informing the latest results even without asking as well as upcoming events and allows booking tickets for any of these.

9. Birthdays – the user is warned about upcoming birthdays and given an option to send a text or to call.

10. Activity Summary – for physical fitness enthusiasts, Google Now keeps track of the distance walked or cycled and displays it.

There are other features available like package tracking, the price of your favourite stocks & shares,cards that show local currency conversion, and many more. Google Now is constantly studying the behaviour of its user and learns from it just as a human secretary would do!

With selling increasingly dependent on the internet, good web design is now increasingly crucial for boosting  sales. The principles described below show how to design web sites to successfully persuade website visitors & turn them into leads & customers.

Clarity

When you visualise a visitor entering your website for the first time, it is clear that you have to capture his interest in the first few seconds as otherwise he may leave the site. Your web page should not be crowded with so much information that the visitor finds it complicated and opts out. You need to present simple and easy to understand information without confusing ambitious statements that claim your items to be the best or most popular and similar declarations which only serve to make everything unbelievable.

It’s also very important to have dedicated pages for each of your individual products & services. This is not only good practice from a search engine optimisation point of view but it makes it easier for the customer to get the required information on the product or service they may want to purchase.

So the first important factor is ‘Clarity’.

Visual Appeal

When a potential customer visits your website, his or her first impressions are most critical to ensure they will continue to spend time on the site. So the second important factor is the ‘Visual Appeal’ of your site. Using familiar layouts, structuring content nicely & making it easy for users to navigate your website is extremely important. Just like when you go into the super market you’d like easily find the products you want to buy you want to make it easy for people to find the information they’re looking for on your website.

Strong Visual Order

You need to plan the order in which you want the visitor to scan your web page. This is where choice of colours, use of blank spaces, ordering of content and prominence of critical objects all work together to create a ‘Strong Visual Order’ by which the user sees the important aspects in your page and in the right sequence.

Grab & Retain Attention

Studies have shown that larger than life images, images showing BEFORE and AFTER scenarios, simple explanatory visuals all serve to ‘Grab & Retain Attention’. On the other hand, a mass of products on the screen and unattractive images only serve to lose audience interest.

Single Desired Action

A page, which has a clear obvious action which can guide the user in a simple but convincing manner, is the final step in the ‘conversation’. Rushing and forcing the user to make a decision, before he has progressed in a natural manner & has all the info he or she needs to understand and accept what you’re offering  would be a bad mistake. Complex products would need more explanatory steps and this need to be factored in. So having built up to the conclusion, the ‘Single Desired Action ‘from the user should be clear and unambiguously visible thus naturally prompting the user to accept. Examples include an add to cart button, a lead generation form to fill out etc.

Conclusion

The five principles described above give a firm foundation to use while designing your website if you want to convert visitors into leads & customers. If you have any questions about the article or would like to learn more about increasing conversions on your website please contact us on 021-2348038

This is an interesting innovative scheme where anybody can use their Smartphone or tablet to take a photograph of the #TAKETHEBISCUIT ad for Weetabix which will appear during the ad break on the ‘Emmerdale’ soap on ITV at 7.15 pm GMT.  They can  then go to any of 700  ‘Boots’ stores and show it to the sales person who will  check it  and give a free packet of Weetabix.(From all the info I’ve found on this, the pay by picture scheme is only available in the UK & not in Ireland)

Weetabix has partnered with Boots for this novel project. Getting a breakfast biscuit in exchange for photos is certainly a new idea & Weetabix spokesperson, Ben Cooper, believes that pictures of their new products circulating among social groups through sharing of images can have a great positive effect on their marketing. He calls it a “move to replace financial currency with social currency”. This is an exciting idea and it will be interesting to watch the results in the days to come.

The company has probably developed a viral marketing strategy which will create a social buzz and hence result in more conversions.

Top rankings in Google for keywords related to your products & services can also dramatically increase leads & sales & staying on top of the search engine results is what reflects industry leadership, but as the Google algorithm keeps on changing, using just one SEO strategy does not work.

In order to build a working Search Engine Optimization strategy you need to think of it as an integral marketing function of your business.

Here are a few tips to help you build a strong SEO strategy;

Integrating SEO with other marketing tools

While search engines are one of the most frequently used platforms by users, other tools like social media, blogs and email are also very important. A website never gets traffic from search engines alone; blogs and social media also play an important role here. Combining SEO with these tools can result into a very powerful marketing strategy & using social media can actually help your search engine ranking.

High quality SEO

Google keeps on updating its algorithm in the favour of users & content written for users not content written for the Google algorithm. Webmasters who use tricks & deploy strategies which exploit the loopholes in the algorithm are very often penalised & to eliminate such loopholes the algorithm is updated every now and then. Most webmasters think the new updates make SEO complicated where in fact; the changes are aimed at making the SEO more fair and straightforward. So very often you may only see short term gains for strategies like this.

That’s not to say that exploiting certain loopholes in the algorithm is not a good idea, when combined with quality SEO, creating good content and creating a better user experience (faster loading pages, lower bounce rate etc) great long term results can be achieved.  But just relaying on the latest “trick” or “strategy” to grab a decent ranking wont last last long.

Conversion rate
The ultimate goal for any business website is to generate leads & sales. One important thing should be kept in mind that successful SEO will only get you a high rankings and targeted traffic; however profits will come from how well your site converts that traffic into leads & sales . If your site has a very good ranking but the conversion rate is low then you are missing out on a lot of potential customers.  So, it’s very important to perform conversion testing & improve your website conversion rate.

Keep an eye on the industry competition and changes

Although no single SEO strategy works for all sites, you must keep a close eye on websites that are operating successfully in your industry. Online marketing is a very dynamic field and in order to stay ahead of others, you need to adopt up to date strategies. Learning from competitors ahead of you, watching their practices & keeping up to date with the latest algorithm & industry news are great ways to try and get ahead of your competitors.

Say no to the ‘dodgy’ stuff

Often you’ll find offers to build 10′s of thousands of links to your business for just a few euro. Chances are this will just end up hurting you more than helping you. While there are some great ways to build links through content a massive influx of more than likely spam links to your site will not go unnoticed by the Google algorithm and could actually hurt your ranking.

If done in the right way, SEO can be a powerful tool to build your business and the above mentioned tips are very useful in developing an effective SEO strategy.