Wizard's blog

Why database marketing is used

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:16:00 +0100

If you have a business, chances are that you also have a record of your clients in a spreadsheet or database.

But - how detailed is the database. Can you profile your clients according to:

Age group
How often they buy from you
Product/service offering they buy from you
Average spend
Behaviour (i.e. what they did on your website and where they left)
Whether they also use a competitor for the products/services that you don’t provide

The more you know about your clients and prospective clients, the better you can tweak your proposition to meet their needs - resulting in more interest.

There’s 3 laws that you need to be aware of:

The Data Protection Act 1998
The Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 which relates to unsolicited messages sent by email, mobile, fax or text
The EU Telecoms Directive which is due to become law in May 2011. This is with regards to ‘cookies’ - the user of the website must give their consent .

I hope to cover this topic in more detail in subsequent posts - security, trends, techniques, etc.

iPad Security Issues

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:00:45 +0100

iPad Security Issues:

Most devices can be hacked these days - but iPad being hacked in one day????

I’m all for it if we can dual-boot with another OS (i.e. one that can multi-task)

Wordpress 3 beta

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 14:11:19 +0100

Wordpress 3 beta:

I’m not brave enough to take this for a spin yet….security/stability issues?

5 simple steps for SEO

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:12:00 +0100

I feel that digital marketing should always be used alongside traditional marketing methods and channels.

The 5 basic steps (there are more) are:

1. Market Research

2. Keyword Research

3. Site structure

4. On-page optimisation

5. Link building (Off-page SEO)

1. Market Research:

Some bloggers mean researching search engines, etc. I actually suggest business-driven market research, i.e.

Who are your competitors?
What are their USPs?
Where is their business coming from?
Where will they be in 5 years?
And so on. Have a thorough understanding of your marketplace.

After that process has been completed, only then should you proceed to analyse competitor’s sites for PageRank, in-bound links, blogger connections, etc.

Thus you can see whether your competitor’s SEO is adequate for their business process/model.

2. Keyword Research

What do people type in search engines?

You can use the Google keyword tool (there are others you can use) to see the daily, weekly and monthly search estimates.

You can export the results to CSV and analyse further to determine what’s best for your site.

You can also get keyword suggestions by looking at competitors sites.

3. Site Structure (yes - you think about this BEFORE designing the site)

So how should it be done?

Before even starting on content, consider the most important keywords that you’ve found from steps 1 & 2.

Use these groups of keywords within your site theme/navigational structure to fit:

Market value
Market offerings/segmentation
Importance of ranking in improving conversion & building credibility
I would suggest using a tool like Excel or Visio (Or the OpenOffice equivalents) to help you visualise the site structure.

It’s recommended to make sure:
your top categories/pages are linked to across the site
you use consistent anchor text in your navigation
you link to other content pages and ‘call to action’ items from the content area of the website
You link to every page on your site from at least one other page on your site

4. On-Page Optimisation

Because it’s hard to rank for keywords that don’t appear in your (page) content, the content/copy for each page should be structured around the goal of ranking for:

A specific keyword phrase
Related phrases
Related keywords
Unique descriptive page titles are important for successful SEO campaigns. Why?

Page titles appear in search results and people link to pages using the page title as anchor text.

Spend particular time on the meta description tags so that they compliment your page title and reinforce your service or product offering.

5. Link building (Off-page SEO)

Why is this important?

Because search engines view links as ‘votes’ for your site. Some votes carry more weight than others (i.e. a link from a site with high PageRank).

In order to get high-quality links that help you with rankings, you need to be socially active on the internet and engage with your community, whether that be your peers, prospects, etc and give away content that people find interesting and share.

The more people that share your content and link to your site, the more links you have. The more links (& traffic) that you have, the higher you rank.

That’s the five steps!

Link building is sufficiently large a topic to warrant another post - I’ll cover this some other time and go into more detail.

If you want to get in touch, check out:

http://www.wizard-solutions.co.uk/index.html

mavericksfilm: Lost Bullets Lost Bullets by Mavericks Film...

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:15:28 +0100

mavericksfilm:

Lost Bullets

Lost Bullets by Mavericks Film - can’t wait to see this!!!

Blackberry app

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:49:09 +0000

This is test post from the Tumblr app for blackberry.

I’ll use this app as well as the email option over the next few weeks.

Real-time search for Google

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Google is developing a system that will enable content publishers to automatically submit new content to them, as opposed to trawling for data.

This new protocol is called PubSubHubbub, or PuSH for short.

It’s explained in more detail at http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

The advantages for small publishers are quite important - they can get their content to Google immediately, as opposed to having to wait to be crawled.

What's the role of the Project Manager?

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:06:49 +0000

What's the role of the Project Manager?:

via popurls.com

Internet Explorer bug(s)

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:50:28 +0000

Well, I always say that IE has a load of flaws…

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/981374.mspx

Microsoft explains how a vulnerability can allow remote code execution - so not good for security.

Check out Firefox if you’re not already using it…

Re-blog

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:54:00 +0000

I’ll be using tumblr as a platform from now on……

Not as great as Wordpress for SEO, but liking the ‘posting on the move’ functionality.

Over the next few weeks will re-post old posts as well as new ones.

First Tumblr post

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:25:23 +0000

Will be using tumblr for a while to see whether it’s all it’s cracked up to be….