Advertise, Don't Spam

There is a really fine line between advertising and spam and unfortunately many business owners and new marketeers do not understand the difference between the two.
This is really important because while a clever, well designed and executed internet marketing campaign can help to attract new business and keep existing customers loyal, spam is highly likely to alienate both new customers and existing customers alike, resulting in damage to your profit margin.

During this post will take a good look at just three basic online marketing strategies such as email campaign, banner ads and message board posts and describe how each can quickly cross this fine line from great advertising to spam.

Email Campaigns
These can also be very useful tools to internet marketers, but again, they must be done correctly.
These campaigns may involve sending periodic e-newsletters filled with information as well as advertisements, short, informative email courses or emails offering discounts on products and services.
Loyal customers who opt into your email list (and you MUST get opt-in addresses to ensure the success of your campaigns) will likely not view these emails as spam as they may know your business or have dealt with you in the past, and therefore may purchase additional products and services from your business as a result of this marketing strategy or at the very least you will remain 'front of mind' when they decide they need to purchase solutions that you offer. Additionally, potential customers who have specifically requested additional information on your products and services will also find this type of marketing to be useful.

However, email recipients who did not request information are likely to view your emails as spam and unlikely to result in a sale or goodwill, further more if the recipients of spam email decide to take action against you then you could find a fine coming your way.
Harvesting email addresses in a deceptive manner and using these addresses to send out mass emails will likely always be considered to be spam.

It's also worth noting that sending an email to someone you did business with too long ago may be inappropriate too; so remove anyone on your list who you haven't have any dealings or contact within the past 2 years.

Banner Ads
These were once one of the most popular strategies accompany an internet marketing plan, and they still have their place in modern online marketing tactics.
These ads are usually the ones that appear at the top of websites and they tend to take up the full width of the site; its is from this appearance that they earned the name banner ads but actually banner ads can refer to a variety of different sizes and shapes which appear in an array of different locations on a website.

In many cases the business owner purchases advertising space on these websites but the banner ad could also be placed as part of an exchange or an affiliate marketing campaign. Exchanges are situations in which one business owner or marketeer is granted permission to place a banner ad on someones website, in exchange for this other business owner is allowed to post a banner ad on his site.
These are great agreements and are usually made made between individual business owners with complementary businesses or as part of exchanges facilitated by a third party. In the case of affiliate marketing, an affiliate posts and advertisement for your business in exchange for compensation when the banner ad produces a desired effect such as generating website traffic or generating a sale. The terms of these agreements are determined beforehand and are generally based on a scale of pay per impression, pay per click or pay per sale or lead.

Now that you understand what banner ads are, it is also important to understand how they can be easily overused and appear to be 'spammy'.
Expertly placing your banner ad on a few websites which are highly likely to attract an audience similar to your target audience is very smart marketing, placing your banner ad on any website which will display the ad regardless of the target audience can be construed as spam. Internet browsers who feel as though your banner ads are everywhere could take an instance disliking to your business and may become extremely unlikely to purchase products or services from you as a result of your banner ads.

Message Boards
Finally, message boards provide an excellent opportunity for business owners to obtain some free advertising where it will be noticed by members of the target audience.
If the products and services you offer appeal to a specific niche, it is worthwhile to join message boards and online forums related to your industry of choice.

Here you will find a large population of internet users who may have an interest in your products. You might consider including a link to your business in your signature or posting the link when it is applicable to the conversation. However, care should be taken to carefully review the message board guidelines to ensure you are not doing anything inappropriate. This is smart marketing. Conversely, replying to every message with a link to your website when it is not relevant to the conversation is likely to be construed as spam by other members. Once they begin to view your posts as spam, they are not likely to visit your website via the links you post.

Some forums attach various rules to their posting guidelines (i.e. you can only post a link after a certain amount of time or after you post a certain number of helpful posts for example).

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The Ultimate Twitter Starters Guide

Setting up and getting started:

• Choose a short username so that users can easily retweet your posts easily without running out of 140 characters
• Ensure that you have completed your profile fully
• Write a short description of yourself and your business 
• Include a link to your website in your description
• You have added a clear picture of yourself/logo
• You have connected your Facebook profile to your Twitter profile so that you can also post tweets to your Facebook page automatically
• Ensure that you can choose which notifications you want to get by email so that you never lose any opportunity for engagement
• You know that you can get a Twitter app for your smartphone and tablet so you can tweet on the go
• You are aware that you can change your profile theme so that it is more appealing to your audience
• You are aware that you can create and manage widgets from your settings menu

Tweeting:

• You are aware that a tweet can only be 140 characters or 130 characters if you include a link
• You know that you can use tools to shrink the URLs you want to include in your tweets
• You are aware that it’s better to keep your tweets shorter than 130 characters so that other users can retweet them and not lose any valuable information

You know what hashtags are:

• You are aware that you have a list of trending topics and hashtags on the left hand side of your Twitter home page
• You are using one or two hashtags for each of your tweets
• You are using trending hashtags in order to raise engagement and get more followers
• You are aware that you can promote a tweet so that more people can see it
• You know that you can add photos and images on your tweets, not just text posts
• You are aware that if you ask in your tweets for people to “retweet” and you don’t shorten it to RT then you have a better chance of getting retweets
• You are asking questions and answering other peoples’ questions in order to raise engagement
• You are aware that you can use tools to schedule tweets for when you are busy (try Hootsuite or Socialoomph)

You know what a direct message is:

• You know that you can only send direct messages to people that you are following and that are following you back
• You are aware that you can schedule direct messages to send to all of your new followers via Socialoomph
• You know that you have to tweet often as your followers’ home pages or constantly changing 

BUT

• You are not sending too many tweets at the same time so as not to flood your Followers streams
• You have checked your analytics and You know when your audience is most active on Twitter and that is when you tweet the most

Following and Followers:

• You are aware that it’s better to have less, but more engaged followers than thousands of uninterested followers
• You are following people that are part of your target audience
• You are aware that you can use tools to bulk unfollow people who are inactive or are not following you back
• You are constantly interacting with your followers:
• Retweeting their posts
• Answering their questions
• Thanking them for retweeting or sharing your tweets and posts
• Favoriting their tweets

BUT

• You are no sending out too many sales messages

Tools:

• You have searched Google and you are aware that there is a plethora of tools that you can use to:
• Manage several Twitter profiles and other social media profiles from the same dashboard
• Schedule tweets and DMs
• Schedule recurring tweets
• Shrink URLs
• Get your Twitter analytics so that you can tweet better

And:

• You are committed to mastering the art of Twitter engagement – and growing your business!

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Pay By Results SEO (Risk and Reward)

I've done a lot of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for a lot of businesses in the past, but I rarely know the specific ins and outs of the business that I do the SEO for; I obviously understand the basics – I understand what they are selling and how they prefer to sell it, I understand the market they want to sell into and more importantly I spend time trying to understand the market, but I often don’t know the ins and outs of how they run their business.

The point is I don’t need to know, I only need to know how to get the best from their website, and determine how best to get traffic (the right traffic) to their site; it’s the owner of the businesses role to understand their business end to end; and that’s why businesses sometimes need SEO ‘experts’ (I would never personally class myself as an expert!).

We take away the stress of getting pages to the top search engine rankings; we do the strategic thinking, we look at and determine the best keywords (often in partnership with the business), we then go out to other sites on the world wide web and try to get links back to the clients site (the best way to improve search engine ranking btw).

So when people say, “You don’t need an SEO expert or consultant” – I sometimes think they are wrong; sometimes businesses do need help in this area.

One area where I do agree with these people is that often, these SEO companies are just after your money, they aren't bothered about your ranking – they just want you to pay them a monthly or one-off fee and that’s it.

What businesses do need is an SEO person that understands that they are putting a lot of faith and trust in their site and their brand, and that they do not want to may a lot for no/little results. Payment should only be made if you get A, B, and C pages on the first page of Google (top 10 results) for X, Y and Z keywords. That SEO person is me.

I will only charge you if I get the results that you want. Contact me for more information andrew@andrewscaife.com

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Link Building is NOT Dead!

I recently read a short blog post about how Link Build is supposed to be dead (in fact illegal!), but that Google's Eric Enge it's been suggested that "webmasters to change their thinking about how they build links", in fact it was suggested that "[webmasters] need to reverse their process and should really think first about compelling content."

Hang on!  This is exactly what real link building has been about since day one, any webmaster or SEO bod worth their salt will first ensure that the target website is fit for purpose, it stands to reason.

Whilst I recognise that this is a really simplistic explanation of the process, but lets imagine that you have a really poor website design with poor content but my sheer dumb look or black hat techniques you manage to get more links that everyone else for your chose keywords/keyphrases; get to the top of Google SERPs anyone that clicks through to your page is going to be mightily disappointed and push that back button! 

So stop thinking first about getting those links, and instead build a great site with fab content that will make people want to visit you in the first place!

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PPC: bid for the right position

 This tip isn't the most obvious for lots of Google AdWords users so I thought I would pass it on as it could a) save you money, b) get you an improved CTR and c) get an improved conversion rate.

Let me start my saying that most new AdWords users start off with a single bidding strategy for AdWords and that strategy pretty much stays with them forever, it’s a good strategy, it’s easy to measure and it does bring with it some success, but it’s flawed!

Adwords offers fairly simple system where the amount you bid, combined with your Quality Score (a figure calculated by Google), equates to what AdWords position on Google your ad will end up with (a position from one to ten)

As a reminder, here the Adwords (Sponsored) ads are highlighted in red; I've also highlighted in red the ad position number.

This strategy that new AdWords users deploy is that they want position 1, it’s the highest position and is therefore the best position to be in right!  It’s the topmost position, so will be seen first as users scan the search engine results, it must be a winning strategy! Wrong (well sometimes it’s the wrong strategy to adopt).

A general rule of thumb and the one that should sound alarm bells is that the users of Google have become blind to the top ads, rather like we all have with banner ads (the ad images that appear at the top of web pages), we all tend to ignore those now.

What you need to do is look at your AdWords stats to determine which ad position you tend to get the most clicks and again as a rule of thumb the lower the average position the cheaper your clicks will be.

Take my latest gig as an example, we were paying more and more for top position ads and we got into a price war with our competitors, so it was getting expensive; no-one really knew what ad position was best for us, but a quick analysis showed that we got more clicks and an improved conversion rate when our ad was around position 3. 

Armed with this little bit of knowledge I did a simple test, I reduced the Max CPC bids where we had an average position better than 3 and increased the Max CPC where we were below position 3. (The plan was to bid for position 3 in all case).

These reduction in bid strategy meant that our ad was less likely to be shown; but where the ad was shown we would be closer to the natural search links, therefore be seen as more relevant, hopefully resulting in an improved CTR and conversion rate.

In just two weeks impressions dropped 18%, clicks dropped 15%, but CTR went up 5% and conversions increased a whopping 17%.  I’m now paying 30% less for AdWords here but gaining on my better conversions.

Don’t get me wrong, years ago when I started using Google AdWords I bid for the position 1 and did everything in my power to maintain it, it worked for me, it brought in business, but little did I know that I could have reduced my costs and brought in more business!

Remember, calculate where you best ad position is and bid for this ideal position, which isn't always the top one! 

Good luck

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What can your website learn from Social Media?

Social Media is the internet success story, we all engage with it in some way shape or form, we love the social channels that we have signed up to, they keep us coming back several times a day; but what exactly attracts us to these sites, and what can we learn from them that we can implement in our own websites to keep visitors engaged and coming back for more?

Most social media sites have the same six attributed that make them successful:

They are Fulfilling – in that visitors can easy discover when they can and get immediate delivery of information and actions. Does your website allow visitors to get to what's important to them quickly and understand what they can/should do on your pages?

They are a Rich source of information – all sources of information at your fingertips, no digging around for what's important.  How does your website stack up? Do you supply rich data? Can visitors see content, price, availability, images, reviews, comments etc all on one page?

They are very Open - very easy to easy to sign up and start their fulfillment process; how is your sign up process? Can users sign up with with an email address and password or do you want their life story first?

Participation is welcomed - not only welcomed but it is positively encouraged in many ways - reviews, comments, ratings etc  Does your site see this level of engagement, so you make users feel that they can contribute and that their contributions are worthwhile?

Remixing the data - many social sites mix up their data a little, so in Twitter for example I can easy find other tweets that the people I follow find interesting.  It's yet another example of how social channels are providing a rich stream of relevant data even if it is pulled from different sources.  Do you supply just the data that you can on your site or are you mixing it up a little?  How about providing news from different news channels for example!

Personalised experience – these social sites are learning from individuals interactions and use that to suggest other things that you might be interested in; they know you are logged in, what you have done in the past and what you might like to do in the future - does your site touch any of that?


I'm not suggesting that your website does all of this - but learn from the social media sites that you use and ask yourself if you can take some of the great elements that you love and put them on your site.

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Search Remains First, Social Second For How People Find Websites

In an interesting report by Forrester Research they highlight that the majority of consumers still find websites through natural search (Google, Bing etc) rather than through Social Media (Twitter, Facebook etc); which to those of us that have been around search, SEO and Social Media for more years than we often care to remember doesn't surprise us.

Even the larger Retail businesses who originally set out to capture lots of web traffic from social media have given up on it and instead use social to influence their search engine rankings and thus bring in more traffic through natural search.

Remember that Google loves it when consumers love your brand, in their eyes, if consumers really love your brand then thy probably want to see your in the results when they try searching for you. 

Social channels is a excellent place for Google to try to understand how much love the market has for you, so if you engage with your social media Followers and Friends, Google will pickup this signal and improve your search rankings.

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Panda and Penguin updates from Google

Lets first of all remember that Google simply loves sites that users love, they want us all to create sites that people love to share with their friends, post of social media sites, bookmark and come back to time and time again, so over the coming months Google is planning a number of updates to it Panda and Penguin algorithm updates to help then serve up great sites.

Panda was introduced in 2011 to weed out sites that have a low quality content (scraped or stolen from other sites or just not useful enough); Penguin was rolled out in 2012 to weed out sites that got links from dubious sources (usually link farms, low quality sites/forums/blogs etc).

Panda

Looks like Google is trying to soften the edges of what they class a poor quality site, certainly some sites with little content (mainly because volumes of copy are not necessary) did get hit by Panda, but in the near future Google will be using some new Authority signals to address this.

These changes to the Authority signals routine should improve the ranking for smaller sites that have a single theme, and has a decent number of good authoritative links.  Better for the smaller sites than the big boys.

Penguin

Google learnt a lot from the original Penguin updates and they did manage to find and destroy a lot of spammy sites that did well in rankings because they got their links from link farms and other low quality sites; they now have a deeper understanding of this murky areas of SEO; so with this extra knowledge they are updating their link analysis algorithm to capture more spammy linked sites.

They will also look to reduce the cluster of results from a single domain on page one of their SERPs.

All in all it looks like some good changes for webmasters that just want to create a decent site for their visitors and are not interested in gaming Google.

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