It’s been like a few weeks since I did my Search Marketing blog post and I would have loved to be back earlier with my post on Social Media Marketing, but unfortunately I have been very busy with work. Anyway I’m back now so let’s get down with some Social stuff!

If you haven’t read my previous posts, you might want to check them out. There’s one on Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing.

2. Social Media Marketing

Over the past few years, social media marketing has grown to become a familiar and a somewhat vaguely understood term in the marketing industry. With Facebook boasting over 300 million users, and presidential campaigns going onto Twitter, it is understandable that marketers want to get a share of the pie, and somehow monetize this ever growing media.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is simply using social networks such as blogs to promote a company’s brand, products and services, as well as build relationship with customers and possibly the general public.

The most common SMM tools are Twitter, company blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and YouTube. As a small business owner, these are a good place to start promoting your business.

Unlike most traditional and online marketing mediums where you can directly measure performance, and track revenue generated, SMM is more likely to impact your business indirectly. For instance relevant user content on your blog can generate a surge in traffic to your website, which could in turn lead to a boost in sales.

Regular tweets on Twitter or posts on Facebook could get you good inbound links to your website which could help with your site’s search engine optimisation. Running a product how-to video on YouTube or sharing product photos on Flickr could build more awareness of your business and brand which can only be a good thing.

How do you start?

The beauty of it all is – it’s usually free and you don’t need to be a marketing guru to be a fantastic Social Media Marketeer! More than likely, you are already one the 300 million users on Facebook (if my dad can get on Facebook, then everybody else can. ), have posted a video on YouTube before, and currently have a profile on LinkedIn. So you are already half way there.

There are a few things to note though when using social media networks for your business and not personal use.

1) Strategise

Like all other marketing efforts, you need a strategy. What exactly are you trying to achieve?

Do you want to increase traffic to your website? Then you’ll need to regularly attract users back to your site by providing a link on your Twitter and Facebook posts, showing your website url at the end of your YouTube video, and for blogs making it easy for users to share your content on sites like Digg and del.icio.us which could generate clicks back to your site.

2) Personalise

Social Media’s are all about me-to-you, forget all the corporate talk and try to relate with your customers on a personal level without sounding ridiculous. Try and find the right tone that you and your customers are comfortable with and stick with that.

3) Listen and Learn

You can learn a great deal about your customers on social media networks. Listen to what they are saying, allow comments on your blog, and read your customers replies to your tweets and posts. Chances are there could be a gem lurking in there that could make your business a whole lot better.

4) Give more than you take

Provide your customers and users with content they will find useful, and they will keep coming back for more!

5) Be Nice!

I will expect that you are already polite and nice to your customers, so this is just to re-emphasise the fact that “customers are always right”. Most social media networks can be accessed by anyone, anywhere in the world, so if you put one foot wrong, you could pay the ultimate price!

Useful Link

Here’s a blog post I really like about Social Media Marketing. Enjoy!

I hope this blog has given you some useful tips to successful social media marketing! Good luck and see you next week for my final post on Top 5 Online Marketing Tips. Have a good weekend.

It’s Monday again, the weather’s looking miserable and the weekend’s four days away but hey you’ve got my Search Marketing blog post to look forward to! What more can you ask for.

If you’re just joining in for the first time, check out my previous posts on Email Marketing and Affiliate Marketing

Right let’s get down to some Search Marketing.

3. Search Marketing

It’s quite amazing that Google launched just over 10 years ago now accounts for a whopping 87% of searches on the internet in the UK and 68% in the US. Internet users are increasingly using search engines like Google, Yahoo, and the newly launched Bing to search for information, products and even companies online. I’ll have to admit that I’m one of those people that enter company names in Google to find their website, I simply can’t be asked to remember the website URL’s of all the companies I use regularly.

As a company, and even more important as a small business, ranking up on search engines is very important (and I stress the ‘very’). Your potential customers are looking for the products or service you offer online using search engines, and if you are not on the first few pages (I never go past page 5) of their search engine results page (SERP), you might as well kiss goodbye to getting clicked on.

Search Marketing is simply ways or strategies you can use to increase your website’s visibility and ranking on SERP.

There are two main search marketing techniques which you can use – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) aka Natural Search, and Pay Per Click (PPC) aka Paid Search.

Most searches you run on Google will give you two results – organic search results, and paid search results. I’ve done an example below, I did a search for pies (I was very hungry ) on Google. I’ve marked out the paid results (on your right) and the organic results (on your left).

To get your website to appear on the organic search results, you use SEO techniques. To appear on the paid search results you use PPC techniques.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

As I explained above, SEO is simply getting your website to appear and rank high on the organic search results of a SERP (search engine results page). When you go on a search engine like Google and enter your search requirements, Google carries out various operations which helps it show you results that are relevant to your search requirements. Obviously the web is extremely vast with around 20 billion pages (which is why you sometimes get millions of results per search), so Google can’t possibly put all these results on the first SERP. As a solution to the problem, Google runs some calculations to see which of the pages best match your search, and then shows you these results first based on its ranking.

As a small business owner, you need to figure out how to make search engines look at your website pages and rank it up on search queries relevant to the page, your product or service offering or the industry you’re in. Also, you need to make sure that your website pages are easy to read by search engines; otherwise they will leave your site and go on to competitor sites.

There are things you can do to make your website rank up when a search query relevant to your site is entered in search engines. These include:

* Keywords: Use keywords that are the same or closely related to what a potential customer will enter into Google to find your product or service offering. See how

* Links: The more people linking back to your site, the more you’re likely to rank up on relevant searches. Search engines look at links to your site and read them as you being important on the subject. See the A-Z of link building.

You also need to make sure search engines can access and read pages of your site.

• Fix any broken HTML links on your site
• Use Valid HTML and CSS, you could validate your site using W3C guidelines
• Try to reduce the use of forms and applications on pages that you want search engines to read. It’ll block the content and search engines may never find them.
• Keep web page file size under 150K, it’s easier for engines to read and index such pages.
• Make sure your Server is not slow or down. It could affect your search rankings and visitors are likely to click on to another site. UK2 Servers come with 100% power uptime and 99.9% network uptime SLG.

If you’ll like to read up more about search engine optimisation, a very good place to start is SEOmoz, and if you’re new to SEO try their Beginner’s guide to SEO.

Paid Search

Paid search is bidding on keywords relevant to your business so that your website or webpage can be displayed on paid results of a SERP relevant to you. Most search engines run PPC campaigns, and my favourite is Google using Google AdWords.

Unlike SEO where you don’t have to pay anything to rank up, with paid search, the more you spend, the higher your ranking.

You can sign up to Google AdWords or AdSense here. There’s also Yahoo! advertising, and Microsoft’s adcenter.

Right that’s me done for today, check back on Friday for my post on Social Marketing.

Have a good week.

Zoe x

Hi,

Here for your delectation is my little contribution to the masses of internet information on how to make good  (and sometimes crazy) money online. I’ve split this up into a series of guides (3 in total) outlining how I think it can happen, why there’s so much internet spam surrounding this, and more importantly how people really do it!

Quite topical at the moment too as the word on the street is that many financial services types are turning their hands to setting up online businesses (I even know of one personally).

Todays nugget is a bit of a no brainer really but I hope I’ve got some tidbits in here you might not have thought of or didn’t consider, so please sit back, relax and I’ll impart my pearls of wisdom for you…

Selling Stuff

Alright, alright anyone could think of this - but the devil is in the details .  As I see it there’s 3 main ways of going about this;

1. Selling actual goods

This encompasses the whole gamut from your classic ebay account/shop or hobby ecommerce site,  software developers selling scripts directly to users all the way to massive corporate sites such as Amazon or Play.com. You don’t have to be much more than a hobbyist for this to develop into thousands a day turnover even for a hobbyist though, but why do some succeed and others fail?

Of course this is a simplification but you need a decent design and good products at acceptable prices which can vary depending on the type of shop, it may just be one product that you sell very well… but the one thing that most successful sites will have in common is visitors, visitors and more visitors (’good’ ones naturally finding the site) as typical conversion rates are lower than people new to online selling expect. This can be achieved through good seo (search engine optimisation), using paid search (google adwords), spreading the word amongst world + dog if you have a unique or very cheap product, or even through offline means (adverts or articles locally or nationally). The possibilities are endless, but the more people that can know about what you are doing and where to find you the better.

There’s also a healthy and very profitable business surrounding ecommerce sites… even we sell a specialist ecommerce hosting! There’s whole sites and businesses dedicated to selling no effort aides like wholesale lists that drop-ship (deliver straight to the customer rather than the site having to keep stock) so you don’t even need to handle any products at all in theory, you can just get the sale, ping off the order to your wholesaler who’ll deliver it anywhere in the world for you! Sound too good to be true? I’m sure there are examples of this actually working but being a bit skeptical I’m inclined to think that a lot could be as a result of the worst of #2 below;

2. Selling Information

The holy grail if you can get it working well, as there’s little or no outlay, you can sell whatever it is as a download and watch the money roll in as you sleep. This can be any sort of information as long as it’s in demand and you can get significant enough traffic to the site(s) to convert visitors into cold, hard cash.

As mentioned above there’s sites out there touting the secrets of online money making in ‘get rich quick’ style from the drop-shippers/best wholesale list to those promising to make you rich without the piffling details of how before you part with usually a small amount of money (they thrive on high volume sales).  To me these owe a large nod to the old tradition of the ‘I made $1000000 in a month, you can too!’ ads you used to see in national newspapers - the big secret being how you make that megabucks is to take out a newspaper ad just like they did and get lots of poor suckers to send you £10 to find out how you made the money!

Sounds like something Milo Mindbender might think up I know but sadly its quite rife, and the thing is they are actually correct, they’re making this money by telling the people that pay how to get other people to pay them for information on how to repeat the cycle!

Pyramid scheme anyone?

If you want to verify this a quick google or bing (maybe!) of ‘how to become rich online’ which will bring you a mixed bag of results, all of them wanting you to pay them to learn their secrets though! To be fair to them some of those I’ve seen have done a good job of explaining exactly how they hook people in by both white and black hat means (ethical and dodgy online marketing means). I haven’t actually paid for these I might add but they have crossed my path in my many years in the internet industry (ahem).

As a side note if you did look at some of the results sites isn’t it interesting that most of them a small one column seemingly never ending affairs, obviously deliberate design, almost like battering ram marketing.

You might be thinking ‘how come they do this as surely everyone would do it if it’s relatively easy?’ Well I have an answer for this too. I read years ago in an ebook that they know full well that 99% of the people reading the info would do nothing about it so they were safe from competition, also they were even deliberately targeting search keywords that they knew low motivation users might put into search engines (allegedly!). I’m inclined to believe it’s true looking at the examples of some of the more successful ones (who I can’t mention of course!)

The same applies for for the wholesale lists and ’sales’ clubs you can join - though some of them I’m sure are perfectly legitimate and of a certain quality like anything that potentially offers easy money there are many people waiting out there to separate you from your money as quick as possible with giving little or nothing back.

As promised here’s my post on Affiliate Marketing. If you are yet to read my previous post on Email Marketing, you can check it out here.

4. Affiliate Marketing
Right, so what’s affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is simply getting other people or businesses to promote your products or services and rewarding them for each referral or sale. Rewards are usually in the form of commissions per referral or sale.

As a small business owner, affiliate marketing is one of the cost effective ways to market your business. Your affiliate does all the work required to get you potential customers, and you simply pay them an agreed commission for it. I’ll say that sounds a lot more attractive than spending hundreds or even thousands on advertising with no guarantee of any returns.

So how does affiliate marketing work?
Simple, there’s a large number of individuals and even businesses out there who run websites solely to promote other company’s products and services. These individuals and businesses are called affiliates. Affiliates usually belong to affiliate networks such as Affiliate Future and Commission Junction. The networks act as a middle man bringing together merchants (company’s that want to promote their business) and affiliates.

Merchants go on to the networks registering their company or products and services they wish to promote on the site, usually at a small fee. The merchant also provides all the necessary information and materials required to promote the product, such as product description, prices, offers and sometimes even banners.

Affiliates registered on the networks then go through merchants on the site picking products and services they will like to promote. This is sometimes influenced by the commission amount the merchant is willing to pay. Once the affiliates have picked the products they want to promote, they add the details to their website, and the marketing begins!

It is the affiliate’s responsibility to get potential customers to their website and promote your products and services to them. Some affiliates do this through Google advertising. Once a visitor to the affiliate website clicks on your product, this click is tracked back to your site by the network, and if it results in a sale, the affiliate then gets his due commission payment.

Running a successful affiliate program
Once you’ve decided that affiliate marketing is for you and registered with an affiliate network, there are a few things you can do to get the best out of your affiliate programme.

1) Promote your affiliate programme on your website. Simply add a link on your homepage called Affiliate Programme which could link to a page describing affiliate commission payments, an example is the UK2’s affiliate page.

2) Arm your affiliates with all the details. Make sure your affiliates are kept up to date with any changes to your products, services and prices. Consider emailing them regularly (most affiliate networks will allow you to do this), not only will this help them promote your products better, but it could help build a profitable relationship between you and your affiliates.

3) Market yourself regularly to your affiliates. You need to make sure your affiliates are motivated to promote your business. You could run a special promotion for your affiliates, for instance the best selling affiliate wins an extra £100 commission.

4) Be Competitive. Always make sure you know what your competitors are paying affiliates to promote their business. Try matching their commission payments or better still beating them. There is no loyalty with affiliates, they will promote whoever pays best.

5)Pay on time. The worst thing you can do for your affiliate programme is to delay payments. Make sure your affiliates are paid on time, and they will happily continue to promote your business.

Earn cash as an affiliate
As well as promoting your products and services through affiliate marketing, why not become an affiliate yourself and earn some cash? You can promote products and services that your customers may find useful and earn some extra £££’s for yourself. Your customers will be pleased you’re providing them with useful links to what they require, and you get a well deserved reward for it.

We’ve got a wide range of products and services you could promote at UK2, from Domain Names right up to Servers, and if you think your customers will find these products useful, why not consider promoting them on your website? We pay up to 30% commission on some products. Click here for details.

Don’t forget to check back next week Friday for my post on Search Marketing. Have a lovely weekend, and hope to see you back here next week.

Zoe

I’ve compiled a list of my top 5 online marketing strategies which I think are a must. Not only have they been proven to boost sales, but I’m quite sure you’ll enjoy implementing them as well.

5. Email Marketing
4. Affiliate Marketing
3. Search Marketing
2. Social Marketing
1. Website

5. Email Marketing

At number 5 I have one of my favourites – Email Marketing. Well, I’m sure I don’t need to explain what emails are; if you’re reading this blog post then you probably know a few things about the internet already. Email marketing can be likened to the traditional direct mail (numerous letters you get from your bank in the post), but you can do so much more with emails. Email marketing helps you communicate effectively with your customers for little or no cost at all.

As a small business owner, customer retention is very important to you and one of the ways you can do this is by being in the forefront of your customers mind so they don’t get blown away by your competitors. What better way to do this than via emails? Bear in mind that most people check their emails everyday.

So you might be wondering, right what do I say on the emails? I say – Loads!

1) Send your customers confirmation emails. If a customer makes an order, why not send them an email to tell them when their order will arrive, or that payment has been successfully processed? It’ll save your customers time contacting you to get this information, and they’ll appreciate your effort.

2) Send regular newsletters, an email newsletter will help you build up on your relationship with your customers. Newsletters are not just offers and news about your company, send your customers information they will find useful so that they look forward to reading your emails.
You can send them relevant tips and information. For example I receive regular newsletters from organic fruit and veg company Abel & Cole; they send me recipes, tips on healthy eating, and even information on seasonal fruits and vegetables.

3) How about sending an e-brochure? Instead of spending hundreds and possibly thousands of pounds on print brochures that might get chucked in the bin, why not send an email with images and descriptions of your new products and services? You could even include special offers as an incentive for customers to buy.
You’ll save yourself a whole load of cash, and even better your customers will get the email in real time, let the sales begin!

4) Changed your address, phone number or launched a new website? Drop your customers an email to inform them of these changes. It’s much better than hoping they’ll make the effort to get this information if you don’t send it to them.

You can generally send two types of emails – HTML and Text. HTML emails are the fancy emails you get in your inbox with images, colours and sometimes even links to videos. Text emails are the bland emails you can send via hotmail, yahoo, Gmail.

There are companies out there that’ll allow you to send out HTML emails through them for free, a good example is MailChimp. MailChimp will provide you with free email templates, so you don’t have to be a designer or a techie to create a great looking HTML email. They also allow you to send HTML emails to 500 subscribers up to 3,000 times a month, all for free.

Can’t be bothered with sending an HTML email? A text email is just as effective, the most important thing is you are in touch with your customers.

Before you start sending emails to your customers, make sure you get their permission first; otherwise you will be spamming them. Also make sure you allow them to unsubscribe from the emails if they wish. Also, there are some legal stuff you need to be aware of before you start your email marketing campaigns.

Well that’s me finished rambling. I hope you have fun trying this out, and please feel free to post any questions if you have one.

If you enjoyed this, check back next week Friday for my blog post on Affiliate Marketing.

Zoe

Web Host Directory, established in 1997, is a brand of Serchen Interactive and a market leader in the hosting industry providing free resources and information for customers researching web hosts online.

To vote for UK2 this month please visit the Web Host Directory UK awards here.

I read yesterday that Sony had completed a deal with Google to make Chrome the default browser in its PCs. This seems to me to be a big move since the historic domination of Internet Explorer could be largely put down to the fact that it is pre-installed and ‘just works’ (kind of anyway, yes I am biased).

This led me to check the browser statistics for uk2.net to see the percentage split with some interesting results. I had no idea that Firefox had gained so much market share with our users as the last time I looked there was only a small percentage using it and visiting our site.

A few of you may be thinking, ‘why change browsers anyway?’ or even ‘what other browsers?!’ click on this to go a useful little link to explain some possible reasons, however this is usually a contentious subject so I would stress please make up your own mind as always! (And of course the obligatory ‘UK2 isn’t responsible for the content of external links’ disclaimer is implied by clicking the link!)

Let us know your preference

If you’re a Firefox evangelist or staunchly pro Internet explorer let us know by replying on this post. It’d be enlightening to hear from any Chrome users how their experiences are using the UK2 site!

My own humble opinion is I prefer Safari on OSX and Firefox on everything else, mainly because Firefox is fast, customisable and follows web standards. Safari because it is noticeably faster than anything else I’ve tried, and I pretty much exclusively Mac based these days (Opera may have been faster, but it was a pain to block internet ads on, so I switched back).

To whet your appetite here’s the overview of visitors to the UK2 site that sparked this post.

UK2 users browsers breakdown

One of our lucky winners was Graham Bayne.

“Good value hosting, fast technical support and prizes too!!”
Graham
Cisternino, Italy

Graham won the UK2 Home Web Hosting Package for a year! Congratulations Graham!!!

The UK2 Home Web Hosting package comes with:

* 10 Websites
* 1 Free Domain Name
* 3GB Web Hosting Space
* 100GB Monthly Traffic
* £20 Google AdWords
* and much more

You still have a chance to be a mystery winner, and a chance to win a Samsung 32″ LCD TV or an ASUS EEE Netbook. You’ll have to hurry though, the competition ends 31st August 2009! Enter Now

One of our lucky winners was Anne Eyles


Anne
Bournemouth, Dorset

Anne won the UK2 Home Web Hosting package for a year! Congratulations Anne!!!

The UK2 Home Web Hosting package comes with:

* 10 Websites
* 1 Free Domain Name
* 3GB Web Hosting Space
* 100GB Monthly Traffic
* £20 Google AdWords
* and much more

For a chance to be a mystery winner and to win a Samung 32″ LCD TV or an ASUS EE Netbook, enter our competition

We are very proud to share with you all that UK2 has been awarded the 2009 Winner for Best Dedicated Hosting at The UK Internet Industry Awards!

These awards are organised by The Internet Services Providers Association (ISPA UK). Attended by senior decision makers, Government representatives and the media, the ISPA’s is the premier event for the industry. This award represents being the very best in the Internet industry and celebrates our innovation and best practise.

Our new upgraded specs include faster processors, more RAM, bigger SATA Drives and SSD! So if you haven’t got our best in the industry Dedicated Servers, get yours today http://www.uk2.net/dedicated-servers/