On Internet Business

Posterous – small business saviour?

Posted by Michael under Social Media

Posterous is making news at present and it could be the answer for small business owners who struggle to equip a traditional business for the new online world.

How it works

Posterous is essentially just another blogging platform – but the difference is that your email account is the administrative interface, so you don’t have a separate, dedicated interface to create blog posts.

Posterous also offers an intelligent service that works for you to solve posting problems. If, for example, you want to add a photograph to a blog post, you simply attach it to the email that you send to Posterous and it then resizes the photo and loads it alongside the text. It will also flash code and embed videos and parse you links so if you add a youtube link, Posterous turns it into an embedded player on the page.

The biggest point in its favour is that it’s free – so for small entrepreneurs, or people whose business is seasonal, it’s a cost-free way of getting good outreach without making investments in hard or soft systems.

Multi-platform posting

Because you can configure Posterous to automatically update your blog, twitter or flickr account, it can be used as a simple one-stop shop for a variety of social media.

Downsides of Posterous

One problem with the platform is that it’s only just got into customisation – until very recently every account opened with Posterous had to look and function in the same way, so more sophisticated users couldn’t develop their accounts beyond the basic platform level. It remains to be seen if the ‘theming’ that Posterous offers will be flexible enough to suit the really skilled user.

Another feature that is lacking is the ability to at static pages or links – this can be done, but only as part of the sidebar called ‘About Me’ which looks unbusinesslike to say the least.

The biggest problem, in the long term, is that you can’t export content from Posterous to other places – without a system of data transfer the value of the system is limited.

Overall assessment

However, for small businesses who don’t have dedicated staff to master and monitor social media, internet pages and the like, but who recognise the need to move past a simple shopfront style website and offer a less static feel to their business presence, Posterous is a good stepping stone. And when Posterous Pro launches at the end of this year, it will offer advanced features like advertising and give paying users more space.

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Microsoft tackles analysing social media

Posted by Michael under Search, Social Media

Measuring the impact and effect of social media campaigns has become a key issue for business. Many tools that measure social media (they are called analytics) are blunt instruments – they create charts but have no real-time flow and have to be accessed, they don’t alert the company to new emergence of social buzz.

Microsoft’s new tool is named Looking Glass and it’s still a prototype with a few chosen companies being involved in a test and response phase at present.

What makes Looking Glass interesting? Two things – the first is that it sends e-mail alerts if social media activity picks up or changes direction – so it reveals negative or positive feedback in social media commentary within the alert. The other key feature is the reporting reveals which days of the week generate the highest activity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites. A Microsoft spokesman said, “… if you are not using it as a listening tool, then you are really not getting the complete benefit of a Twitter or a Facebook because a part of [your] job is to watch the conversations on the wall.”

Looking Glass is not the only kid on the block though – new systems with similar approaches have been launched by Squidoo which offers a way to let brands filter their online reputation for a fee. And Trackr has launched an online Authority List that tracks and identifies thought leaders the online communities. As it says on its website: Discussions on brands, products and trends are no longer controlled by marketers. Influential bloggers, reviewers, gamers, and other digital creators lead these conversations and shape opinions.

So why does Looking Glass stand out? The main reason is that it blends social media data with reporting from other campaign channels such customer databases, call- and service- centres and sales data so that an organisation has a seamless sense of the ‘buzz’ and a clear picture of where that buzz originates. And it allows a company to keep track of who is saying what about it, through which channels. Not all businesses are convinced of the need to monitor social media, partly because they can’t see how to integrate monitoring with PR or other promotional activity, if Looking Glass can offer the ability to link sales data, commentary and management of brand, for example, it may make the breakthrough into the mainstream that the other systems haven’t.

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Adtech London September 22-23rd 2009 Review

Posted by Michael under SEO Conferences and Exhibitions

Ad:Tech London finished yesterday.  For me the highlight of the presentations was Will Chritchlow of Distilled Media .  This was a perfect presentation for a number of reasons.

1. Know your subject

The speaker clearly knew what he was talking about. This contrasted greatly with another presentation I saw at ad:tech by an SEO company who claimed to have helped their client by propelling  two content sites that mentioned their clients product in a favourable review to the top of the google organic listings within 48 hours. How did they do this ? Ah well that’s a secret. Yes of course it is ! 

2. Useful Information.

He gave away few tasty titbits that certainly interested me. How did you get your stats to record a paypal sale. This is an issue that has been bugging me and hence our programmers for months. No one expects presenters to gave away the shop but a few useful bits of information starts a relationship of trust and will pay back in the long term. 

3. Presentation Style

He is a natural presenter able to engage with a group of people. His slides were interesting and professionally styled.  All in all 10 out of 10.

Jennifer Janson of Sixdegrees PR also gave an excellent presentation on a subject which all Marketing Directors should be focussed on. Marketing Metrics (how to measure the success of your PR efforts).

For me one or two nuggets makes it worthwhile going to an exhibition so thank you Ad:Tech.

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SEO and Flash

Posted by Michael under Search

Flash animation was developed as a way of allowing a website to display highly complex content because it fits more of that content in a finite space, without destroying the aesthetics of the page design.

However, it’s also go itself a bad name as being impossible to integrate with SEO or even as being invisible to search engines. This isn’t necessarily the case, but if you’re opting for a Flash-based website for your business, there are issues that you need to understand before, not after, you put the site into operation.

Starting with Flash

The first thing to do is to ensure you’ve got five key areas fully integrated:
1) Content creation – how are you going to update your flash site, who will be responsible for refreshing content?
2) Copy – traditionally copywriting techniques don’t work with the clean ‘white-space’ attributes of Flash, so be sure your copy or copywriter is aligned to the Flash ideal
3) Site architecture – html based sites have a simple enough map – be sure that your Flash site is just as navigable not just for the end user, but for everybody in your company who needs to tweak the site
4) User experience – be sure your users are likely to be Flash-lovers. If you’re selling orthopaedic beds, it’s not likely that your target demographic will appreciate Flash nearly as much as if you were selling skateboards!
5) SEO – don’t abandon SEO to be ‘sorted out’ after your site is built and the content has been agreed. SEO needs to feature in the decision making process too.

One method for optimising Flash sites for SEO uses blended architecture, this means the site has search engine accessible content plus JavaScript to detect when browsers are capable of viewing Flash. If a browser has Flash capability, the Javascript organises the page’s document object model to replace the alternative content, which has primacy, with the Flash movie. As search engine spiders don’t trigger Javascript they automatically find and indes the non-Flash content which should include: links, headings, text and images, and should be SEO optimised. Sites like the Cadbury one are blended architecture.

When to use Flash

Flash should be used for functionality – if you want to show a movie that demonstrates your product’s movement, like a stairlift or sells a personality, you need Flash, but if your content, offer or benefits is static – like a shopfront or a photographic model whose appearance is generally frozen in a photograph, you don’t necessarily need Flash.

Guidelines on alternative content

If you’re using a blended architecture site, you have to ensure that the text items are absolutely the same as the Flash ones, or it can be seen as spamming and your URL may end up blacklisted. Using alternative rich systems like Adobe to reflect the content of a slideshow or film is not spamming, in fact it’s recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative which says that multimedia content should have an alternative representation available to ensure all web users have equal access to all information.

Top Tips for Search Engine Friendly Flash

• Where possible, embed your Flash into html pages so the page is found immediately by spiders and ensure that your html content is an exact representation of the Flash content
• Create textual representations of what is in the flash using no-embed tags
• Consider breaking down any large flash files into smaller ones so that you can create more content for your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) if you have one flash and one html-based page to reflect it, your site may look thin to search engines. Deconstructing it to create various html pages, each about different concepts in the Flash page, can give you added richness.

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Optimising a business website for SEO keywords

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Search

Assuming you’ve worked out your keywords, what should you do with them?

Once you’ve identified your keywords – structure them

This means taking the most important two or three, and using them appropriately in your website. The essential places to utilise them are: titles especially the website title, headers, image alt links and in descriptions and article titles. Finally you use all your keywords, not just the high priority ones, in the content pages of your site to reinforce the search engine’s explorations so that your sight looks rich in information relevant to the enquirer.

Keyword Popularity

Use a keyword popularity tool to explore the options for the keywords you’ve identified. This does two things – it offers alternatives to your identified keywords, so that your text doesn’t look keyword heavy and clunky, and it reveals new and linked words that might draw the right kind of business to your site.

Be careful though – just because a word is reckoned to be popular, it also needs to be relevant to your business and your target audience. In the USA, for example, one of the top three words in terms of popularity related to ‘writing’ as a keyword is ‘resume’. So ‘resume writing’ would seem like a good keyword … but if your target audience is predominantly British, it won’t be using that word at all because in Britain people say ‘CV writing’ not ‘resume writing’.

Apply common sense to your choices because there’s no point generating interest that you can’t fulfil, nor in failing to reach a target audience because you’ve chosen the most popular key words rather than the ones that will attract the right people to visit your site so that you can convert them to customers.

Content and Optimisation

Another important point is not to destroy your site’s appearance in favour of keyword optimisation. If you’ve ever visited one of those ‘make a million dollars guaranteed’ type websites and entered a completely circular world where every time you click a link it leads you to another, even more key-word dense page but never to the information you were promised, you know that visitors can lose the will to live, let alone to click, if optimisation is given priority over content.

It’s not enough to have good content alone, and it’s never enough to produce a superbly optimised site without solid content that pleases visitors and allows for a high level of conversions: combining the two is essential to getting the blend right.

Off-Page Optimisation

Off-page optimisation is a series of strategies that allow your website to maximise its chances with the various search engines. The most important tool is linking – you can do this by launching a link campaign, asking complementary businesses to provide links to you as you provide one to them. Other tools are:- directory listings where you have to apply to be included: the most important are DMOZ and Yahoo!; issuing online press releases; article distribution systems; using social networking; blogging and forum posting. All of these give your site a higher profile by making it look more relevant and more substantial, and that moves you up the search engine rankings.

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Getting Started with SEO

Posted by Michael under Search

SEO looks like black magic or arcane science to many people who either don’t understand it, or who’ve been ‘sold’ the idea that SEO is something you have to pay somebody to do for you. This isn’t true; although SEO can be time consuming at first, understanding the basics of SEO can help your business thrive, whether you choose to undertake the work yourself or whether you hire in expertise.

The first thing to note is that many of the tools you need to master SEO are actually available to you for free via the internet. This means that you can play around with the concepts and strategies of SEO for yourself without it costing anything except time.

Get cosy with Google

Begin by getting familiar with Google. Love or hate the search engine empire, it’s the biggest driver of online business and you need to work with it to get the kind of visitor rates that can be converted to customers. And because Google provides a service, it helps you get your site high in the Google rankings. To begin, you go to their Webmaster Central pages and register an account so you can begin to benefit from their services. They have an advice section, they show you how to submit a site map that helps Google rank your pages, and even how to write a robots.txt file. The good thing about putting in the effort with Google is that it pays off for all other search engines too.

Work out your keywords

There are three routes to doing this:

1) Ask your customers – find out what they put into a search box to get to the services or products they want to find
2) Ask your staff – what words to they use to describe the business or their jobs, or to communicate with each other. Don’t forget this stage because often there are words that are used within the business that you’ll forget to include in your keywords because you think they are industry specific. As an example, ‘technical’ is not a word that many people would think of as featuring on a running shoes website, but ‘technical clothing’ is a term often used to describe fabrics that wick sweat away from the body, or shoes that contain shock absorbers, so serious runners will often use this terminology in searching for top-of-the-range shoes.
3) Check out the competition – see what words your rivals are using, they often know the best words to drive business to their sites.

You can use a keyword tool to help you find other keywords that are related to the list you produce. Google have Adwords, which can be found via their Webmaster page, or you can use a tool like Spacky which gives you a monthly feed of search volumes on related keywords for Google, Overture/Yahoo and MSN.

Next time, how to optimise your site for those keywords you’ve found.

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Online retail growth impressive

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

In the UK there’s been a 17% market growth in online retail comparing July 2008 with July 2009. That equates to the British consumer having spent £4.2 billion on online shopping in July.

E-retail winners and losers

The biggest drivers of the increase are clothing, accessories and electrical goods, according to the IMRG Capgemini Index which measures e-retail sales.

Fashion has been faltering in the high street with some stores (TopShop) doing well while others (Zara) appearing to struggle to maintain market share. Inditex, the clothing group that owns Zara is predicted to report a 12.6% drop in half-year profits. But in e-retail, the clothing index has performed above the overall market with an average of 20% year-on-year growth to date.

Reasons for the continuing success in difficult trading times include the new sophistication of online selling, which has brought a new level of intimacy to their communications with former customers as well as better targeting of new market share. This has led to better conversion rates.

One e-retail sector that doesn’t seem to have benefitted is booze. July saw the first drop in sector sales for five years, with a 23% decline on July 2008.

Men outspend women online

Fascinating snippets from the online retail sector reveal that:

• men outspent women by £672 in the six months to April 2009 according to PayPal, which may account for the increase in sales in electrical goods, traditionally a male purchasing preserve
• the Co-operative Travel Group predicts its web-based sales will rise by nearly 300% from £3 million to £11 million in the next 12 months, possibly in part driven by deals and special offers
• online searches for UK-based discount vouchers have increased by nearly 50% in the past year, say Hitwise.

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Trainline.com responds to comments

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

I’ve had occasion several times to mention www.trainline.com on this blog, and never in a complimentary way. So it was good to receive an email saying “We’ve changed, give our new website another go…”

I’m not claiming to be the total cause of their change of mind, but perhaps they have been influenced by some of my comments! And if you try out their improved service before I do, let them, and me, know what you think.

We’ve changed, give our
new website another go…
• Much quicker checkout process
• Singles and return fares on a single page
• Journey summary tracks your purchase

Since you last booked a ticket with us, we’ve made some changes which means it’s even easier and quicker to buy cheap train tickets. Why not give us a go and see for yourself?

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Google struggles to challenge the iPhone

Posted by Michael under Mobile Search

The iPhone has made the great leap from being ‘just another’ smartphone into the rare territory of becoming an essential organisation and communication tool. It’s pretty well unrivalled in this area, and with more than 65,000 applications in the apps store, you can find an application for almost everything you can think of.

Given the value of this territory, you’d expect challengers to be emerging and indeed, Google was predicted to challenge Apple in the smartphone market this year, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. In fact, according to the Sunday Times, Google is struggling. And this is against a background of some apps creators and technology pundits starting to express concerns about the tight control Apple maintains over its many apps, and the development process that brings them to market.

How Apple got it right

There are several reasons that Google isn’t cutting it: one of which is user-friendliness. The iPhone meshes with a number of systems that are likely to be familiar to the new user. 

Also, iPhone got the media buzz by launching early and keeping tight control of its apps system, while the Google decision to partner with a range of providers proved to be a problem – the claim that the G1 would be just the front runner in a whole range of Android-featuring products just hasn’t happened. The ‘thousands of different phone models’ that were going to use Android haven’t appeared in shops, and that means that the system just isn’t as attractive to software developers.

Google fights back
 
On the plus side, Google’s Android offers open standards, which give software developers a free hand. But the delay in getting Android out allowed the iPhone to build loyalty in the vanguard of tech leaders, a small but key market that can make or break new technology. If the CEO uses iPhone, the whole company will use iPhone … and to break Apple’s hold, Google–or rather Android–will have to win some of those trend leaders away from their dependence on the iPhone.

Another sign of hope is that Motorola is launching new, Android-powered, phones this autumn, to fight back against the Apple and BlackBerry systems, and Motorola’s share of the predicted 90 million smartphones in the USA by the end of 2009 could be enough to tip the Google/Android system into success.

And there does seem to be some evidence of that happening. According to Flurry, Google has a significant increase in apps projects being created on Android between January and July this year – in fact new apps projects starting on Android has doubled, in relation to the iPhone app start-ups, since the beginning of the year.

Photo courtesy of katielips at Flickr

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Review: “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits”

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership

If you can’t afford to hire top motivational speakers, business strategists and accountancy teams to examine your current business success and show you how to build on it, or if you don’t want the ‘standard corporate model’ applied to your SME, how do you access the latest thinking and best techniques to take your smaller business to the next level and to guarantee its future?

Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Fast-Growth Firm could be the answer for you. It’s an excellent business book whether you’re an online trader or an offline business that relies on a geographic or specialist customer base.

The first thing it offers is a simple but effective framework which ensures management focus and coordination. The second major advantage to this book is that it is really a series of short but information and strategy-packed essays so that you don’t have to read it from cover to cover to master key areas – if you’re struggling to manage meetings, for example, you can focus straight on Mastering the Daily and Weekly Executive Meeting. Or if you’d like to understand the relationship between brand, customer and success, you can read Mastering the Brand Promise first.

Perhaps the weakest part of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits is the chapter titled Mastering the Art of Bank Financing which probably isn’t going to provide the same kind of in-depth practical help as the other chapters, in fact, if you’re searching for finance, this isn’t going to move you forward that much.

That shouldn’t take away from the value of the rest of the book though. If you want one book to take you through the many facets of running a successful business, this is the one.

Money image courtesy of Austin Evans at Flickr

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