7 strategic content tips to help your website grow

Posted on December 15, 2010 by mairead

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics | Tagged content gathering tips, content management, gathering content | Leave a comment

Content Strategy. It’s a buzz word in online marketing, but one that needs and deserves attention. If you have no direction or strategy for your content, then your site is doomed from the get-go. Unfortunately, even in 2010, the web is still full of stagnating brochure websites that are unlikely to reach their full potential from both a traffic, and user experience perspective.

Content strategy allows you to achieve business goals by laying out an actionable plan of how to develop. market and maintain content which goes on your website. There are a number of things worth thinking about when you are sitting down to start a new project, and hopefully this article summarises some content tips which can help your website really grow

Ensure Content Keeps Evolving

Many businesses wrongly approach designers or developers with the age old cry of ‘I need a website‘, a war cry many of you will be all too familiar with. The more naive of customers will undoubtedly be treating their website as a box ticking exercise that requires little or no work once its ‘done’. As many of you will know, a good website is an evolving relationship between business and consumer, and it’s important that your content management system allows for that. A good content strategist will ensure that old content gets removed or updated, and new content takes pride of place.

Lead with Content not Design

A great designer not only makes things look good with aesthetics, but understands that they can’t ‘design’ until they know what information they need to portray. A great design will never make up for substandard content.

If your content isn’t attracting links, by definition, it isn’t great. That’s simply the way the web works today. It therefore makes sense to place equal if not more importance on content, including the planning of it prior to starting any web project. Social media explorer have some great questions to coax the information out of your clients, or indeed to ask yourself.

Identify your Tone & Voice

Even before you start to develop your content, and think about what your audience really wants, you should think about the tone that your business takes with it’s customers. Are you a friendly brand that needs to keep things light and fluffy? Or do you need to maintain the professional corporate image that your existing marketing material has taken? I absolutely love the advice the guys from Innocent Smoothies give on this, a brand that I personally admire a great deal.

Define Key Themes and Subtopics

At the outset you should ascertain what the primary topics and key themes are to concentrate on. Mind mapping different areas of your business (see some of the mind mapping and prototyping tools that are available for that) is a great way to get to grips with the areas that your content should address. When you have brainstormed all the different services, products, problems, and facets of your business, you can move on to logically categorising them. This can then form a good starting point for navigational categories for a blog or website.

With not everyone thinking in the same way, it makes sense to use keyword research to make sure that you are calling a spade a spade. There are a variety of SEO keyword tools available online free of charge to really drill down and examine what areas are going to get you the best results.

Make it evergreen

Evergreen content stays relevant long after it has been written. You should be thinking about what sort of articles will stand the test of time, attract links and build your site as an authority. Evergreen content takes time to create, but will form a good starting point for the rest of the content. There are a number of ways to do this.

If there are a handful of key concepts in your industry, you may for example, want to provide definitions for them, and serve as a reference piece for other bloggers and websites. I’ve done this before successfully with my seo glossary in the past.

Other things you may want to look at include. How to articles – these are often bookmarked for reference, which can have a exponential effect on your traffic. List articles which are easily digested by visitors. Technical articles which teach your visitors something new. Or just plain old resources and freebies.

Align content with business goals

There’s no point in creating content on your site which doesn’t serve any purpose. Before you create content, decide whether it meets any of the following criteria.

1) Will it generate links and contribute to ongoing SEO efforts? Has it been architected with the properties of great linkbait? Will my audience read, share or link to it? Will they care?

2) Does this content relate closely to my business? Will this increase my authority as a trustworthy business in the sector? Will it drive direct or indirect sales?

3) Is this only relevant to internal staff? Should it perhaps be an intranet article instead? Does this article exist elsewhere online? Is there a duplicate content issue with it that needs addressed?

Think Sideways

Thinking sideways essential involves knowing what is hot out there, and using that information as a springboard for your content. One of the things I’ve learned in my short time as a blogger, is that chasing news isn’t a fun task. Whilst breaking news is beneficial, it isn’t easy – especially with other more established blogs sitting in Silicon Valley day in day out hunting out stories. What you can do however, and a part of my own strategy, is to think sideways.

Microsoft announce migration from Live Spaces to WordPress – write a guide, not a news article.

Google announce real time results – tell your visitors how to track it in Google Analytics – while others cover the news.

Both these articles filled holes in topics with practical articles that were receiving attention at the time, and both received a good flow of traffic

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5 Unique ways to use Twitter for business

Posted on December 13, 2010 by mairead

Posted in Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing | Tagged generating business with social networking, twitter for business | Leave a comment

1. Pitch Your Followers

As part of Mountain Dew’s DEWmocracy campaign, the soda company empowered Flavor Nations — fan communities for new Dew flavors — to own a flavor of soda that the company is now testing on the market. Mountain Dew literally ceded control of the go-to-market strategy for each of these flavors to the consumer communities.

As part of the creative process, Mountain Dew even made advertising agencies pitch the Flavor Nations with their creative. While this wasn’t done via Twitter alone, the notion of putting brand advocates in the position of power is pretty remarkable.

You could steal from the Dew’s strategy and find a way to give your biggest brand advocates creative control over your next event, campaign or company initiative. Spend the time internally to craft a few solid ideas and then pitch them to your followers. This should be much more than a poll or vote, and instead more akin to empowering your Twitter influencers as project stakeholders.

2. Reward Loyalty

Tasti D-Lite’s initiatives are defining the social media loyalty program. A huge part of their strategy is automatically rewarding customers with TreatCards when they tweet about the brand. It’s also an important part of their plan to build brand awareness so that they can open more stores across the United States. Starbucks has similar notions around loyalty and social media and is experimenting with Foursquare for that purpose.

Both companies have recognized that there is real business value every time a customer or fan shares their purchase behaviors with their friends. If you can find a way to automatically reward loyalty for Twitter-sharing, you’ll be motivating your audiences to spread your message for you. It’s a win-win for everyone, as long as you carefully consider the image of your customer and the message they push out to their followers.

3. Market Research

All too often, Twitter is used only for distribution purposes. But in fact, it’s a valuable tool for keeping tabs on your competitors, as well as your brand’s existing fans.

Power Twitter users have learned the advantages of keeping a careful eye on the network’s trends, and that they can perfect the market research capabilities of Twitter by using Twitter Lists. Business users should absolutely follow suit.

Invest several hours in building a few solid lists that you can easily track every day. Make sure that you track down innovators, influencers, those that break news in your space. Competitors and those that your competitors follow — both companies and individuals alike — are also key. Then remember to add to each list moving forward as you find more relevant names.

If you really want to use Twitter for market research, create a list of your biggest brand advocates and loudest brand naysayers and hang on their every word — even if that means reading up on their weekend activities. If you can get into the minds and lives of the people you’re trying to serve, you’ll have a better idea of what your customer wants.

On this front, get yourself a Twitter application that supports Lists in a way that works for you. I find Echofon for Mac ideal for this purpose, as there’s one list that I watch like hawk — I call it my “Stalking” list. It’s private, but it includes every person and company in the industry that breaks news relevant to what I write about. The application alerts me, with audio notifications if I so choose, any time there are new incoming tweets on the list I’m watching. Other applications are just as list-friendly, so don’t be afraid to try a few out.

4. Target Niche Audiences

The beauty of Twitter is that you can potentially reach anyone in the world with a single 140 character tweet. That’s powerful stuff, but with that kind of reach, business users often forget to narrow the scope of their Twitter presence and connect with smaller communities. While Promoted Tweets aren’t live for everyone, they will offer business users a highly sophisticated way to target their tweets to more niche audiences.

Take Virgin America for instance. The Twitter-savvy brand wasted no time targeting Promoted Tweets toward their inflight WiFi customers. On launch, the company put out three distinct tweets that they then promoted with carefully crafted keywords. Two of the tweets were meant to engage just their passengers at 35,000 feet. Just imagine how cool it would be to fly Virgin America and uncover a tweet that was meant just for you. That’s the power of talking to a smaller audience.

No brand or business should turn to Promoted Tweets or alternative Twitter advertising options for a cheap Twitter win. Your audience will only respect your Twitter presence if you demonstrate that your ultimate goal is to serve their needs (and not your own). If used wisely, targeting niche audiences with Promoted Tweets could be a powerful way to use Twitter for business on a whole new level.

5. Add Your Own Metadata

Beginning next quarter, Twitter will introduce annotations as a way for developers to attach any kind of metadata — tags, notes, location — they want to tweets. While we’ll no doubt see a number of developers build applications for unique purposes — some of them with the business user in mind — we see this as a prime opportunity for radical businesses to craft their own applications with metadata specific to their goals.

Used in combination with the simplistic developer tools available via @anywhere, this could be a powerful way to add Twitter integrations to your site, append notes about visitors’ on-site Twitter behaviors, tag tweets that originate from your site, or attach your own identifiers and figure out ways to reward actions (perhaps even loyalty). There’s definitely opportunity to be creative and better track Twitter-related data at the same time.

Article Written by Jennifer Van Grove

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Mistakes with e-commerce: Poor Website Implementation

Posted on December 8, 2010 by mairead

Posted in Ecommerce, News | Tagged ecommerce website tips, tips for online shops | 2 Comments

Making the checkout too long winded

Amazon has it working perfectly. Because of the one click checkout. You should be on the lookout for an e-commerce platform that has this sort of functionality, it will increase your conversion rate by up to 7%. Even having all the checkout on one page makes it easier for people to buy

Over Validating

Be careful with validation. Sometimes it can be evil and can go horribly horribly wrong. Its ok to want to avoid errors being sent to your lovely shiny online shop, and you want to avoid the idiot who wraos his head off the keyboard when he is typing his credit card. But, you need to make sure that the process is tested. I’ve seen online shops that have required an issue number for a Maestro ( where they don’t have them) Some that won’t accept Northern Ireland post codes and others simply don’t allow you to checkout without first signing in. Failing to test on of these and other validation issues will result in lost sales, and annoyed customers.

Friendly Errors

The world of software development is often littered with so called technical issues. Errors will crop up from time to time, be it dropped connections, or missing settings after an update. We will need to accept that sometimes. The trick is how you go about handling these problems will be how you are remembered

Something that isn’t however acceptable in the online world are massive server error pages. The reasons for this are twofold. First – you risk exposing the details of the web server to unwanted things. Second – it looks unprofessional to any potential customers visiting the website and it might even influence them as to whether they decide to come back to the website again. Server error = no trust. Redirect them to a server 500 page, log the error, and show the customer something friendly.

Poor Search Implementation

If you include a search box in your website, it had better work. Many users go straight to the search box of a website. So if you are going to implement a search feature on your site, you should be doing so in such a way that searches most if not all of your text based fields in your database. i.e search will return results for product name, or anything matching the search description.

Slow Site

A slow website almost always means a poor reputation. If your website is quick to load, then it projects the image that your customer service will also be as quick, or that the customers order will arrive promptly. It also results in increased consumer spend, as people will be more likely to navigate further into your side and around your products.

Speeding up your website can be done by avoiding flash like the plague, and keep your image size to a minimum. It’s important to strike a balance with with images, as too high resolution will put customers off because they are slow to load whilst too small images won’t encourage sales. So strike a balance by perhaps having larger images available in a new window.

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Google closes the App Gap

Posted on December 1, 2010 by mairead

Posted in News | Tagged google apps, google news, technology news | Leave a comment

Google has an early Christmas present for its Google App Users: Access to nearly the entire suite of Google services through any Google Apps account

This means that people who pay for Google Apps for your domain can now host Google Voice, Reader and 60 other cloud-based applications and services, giving administrators a way to integrate just about all of Google into their own custom domains.

While Google apps users have long had integrated Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Contacts, other popular services like Reader, Picasa and Voice have been off limits. All of these free Google services have remained available to anyone with a free Google account but not to a Google Apps hosted service which allows users to tie Gmail, Calendar notifications, document sharing and their contacts database to their contacts database to their own, custom domain name. Google’s paid Apps service starts at $50 or €40 approx. a year.

The workaround for most people so far has been to sign up for, say, a Picasa account, using a regular Google Apps e-mail address. While that works, it lacks the tight integration you get with the rest of your Google Apps — namely shared contact lists, settings and links to other apps within each app.

If you’ve got administrator access to a Google Apps account, starting today you should see a message on the main Google Apps admin page that will walk you through the setup and allow you to chose which services you’d like to enable. If you don’t see the message, keep checking, Google is rolling out the new features to everyone over the next few weeks.

There is of course a catch. If you’ve already set up accounts with any of the newly available services using your Google Apps e-mail address (the old workaround described above), you may get a message saying that your account can’t be upgraded. The problem is that your old account is conflicting with the new one.

This problem doesn’t affect all Google services, and according to the Google Help Center, the company is “currently in the process of wrapping up some necessary infrastructure work to ensure that the transition for those users will be a seamless process.” In other words, you’re going to have to wait.

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How business people use social networking effectively

Posted on November 26, 2010 by mairead

Posted in Company News, Ecommerce, Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing | Tagged facebook, social marketing, twitter | Leave a comment

Social networking can sometimes be an intimidating concept. Many business people are unsure of where to start and have been slow to adopt the changing online landscape. However as part of a business strategy it is well and truly here to stay. Smart business men and women are dipping their toes in unfamiliar territory and coming out with the rewards. Here are some of the ways smart retailers are using social networking to grow their business online.

Social networking empowers consumers to make product reviews on their blogs, and other review sites. Business people are embracing this trend and offering product reviews from happy customers on their own website. If you aren’t doing this then you are missing out for several reasons. Customer reviews offer you an easy and cost effective way to grow organically by providing additional user generated content to search engines. Secondly, product reviews offer some feedback as to why a specific product was bought or why the wouldn’t buy it.
Transparency is the key here. You have to be prepared to suck it up and take the rough with the smooth. Asos is a good example of getting it right. recently they have launched a website called asosreviews.com which highlights the good and the bad comments coming directly from customers via twitter. It provides a visual gauge to let potential customers see how they are doing at a glance
Be honest and allow negative feedback as well as positive. Address it on your own site when it occurs. or face your visitors taking the negative feedback elsewhere on the web.
As part of your marketing strategy you should be asking all of your existing customers the questions to find out how many of them have a social networking profile or indeed a blog that you can update within your existing customer database. For example if 60% of your customers have a facebook profile and 10% have a Twitter account then running a facebook account is more beneficial then using twitter to reach out to them. It also gives you the data you need to run a more targeted email marketing campaign which will tie closely in with each of the audiences.
One of your primary goals when using social networking is to grow your business and website traffic, should be encouraging the sharing process. Smart retailers are offering discounts and special offers to those customers who are tweeting about their products.

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Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mark Zuckerberg, “A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg”

Posted on November 19, 2010 by mairead

Posted in Company News, Press Releases | Leave a comment

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Rich Data Visualization with Microsoft Chart Control

Posted on November 18, 2010 by bejoy

Posted in Company News | Leave a comment

Microsoft Chart Control for .NET Framework enables you to add robust charting abilities to your applications with little effort. You can create ASP.NET pages or Windows Forms applications with simple, intuitive, and visually compelling charts for complex statistical or financial analysis.

The MS Chart control allows you to plot data in charts according to your specifications. You can create a chart by setting data in the control’s properties page, or by retrieving data to be plotted from another source, such as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. These controls are specifically designed for use with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and later versions.

Chart Control for .NET Framework has the following key features:

Visual Studio design time support.
25 distinct chart types.
3D support for most chart types
3D customization, including perspective, lighting, rotation, border skins, anti-aliasing, transparencies, isometric projections, shadows, and more.
Unlimited number of chart areas.
Automatic and manual layout and alignment management.
Automatic and manual scaling.
Logarithmic scaling for any base.
Fully customizable legends.
Intelligent data label positioning.
Chart annotations, scale breaks, interlaced strip lines, drill-down charts, tool tips, data labels, and more.
Zooming and scrolling. (Windows Forms)
Data binding.
Data copying, merging, splitting, sorting, searching, grouping, and filtering.
Data exporting.
Binary and XML serialization.
Empty data point handling.
Unlimited number of data series and data points.
Support for dates, times, currency, and more.
More than 50 financial and statistical formulas for data analysis and transformation.
Real-time chart manipulation.
Post-paint and pre-paint events.
Support for AJAX click events.
State management. (ASP.NET)
Binary streaming. (ASP.NET)
Animated frame rate control. (ASP.NET)

Download Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET 3.5

Get Sample Environment for .NET Framework 4 Chart Controls

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Where to find great content

Posted on November 18, 2010 by mairead

Posted in Company News, Internet Marketing | Tagged email marketing, generating content, google indexing, twitter | Leave a comment

Creating content and keeping it updated can be hard work, but it is critical to growing your online presence. Quite often good oppurtunities are overlooked to build great content using resources that are often not used or gathering dust somewhere under your desk or in a forgotten drawer.

This post will go through some of the things that you could be adding to the website.

Newsletters: Many of you probably already use email marketing to promote your business. You’ve probably spent the better part of the day trying to create the content for these from scratch. Given that emails are largely private, there is no way of search engines to notice and reward this hard work. Instead why not create and send the newsletter and store it in an archive section of your website helping both your customers to find a newsletter that they may have lost and search engine bots to access the content
Presentations: If you are in a corporate or large business environment, you’ll without a doubt have to create a number of presentations at some stage. Marketing reports and end of year summaries may actually be great for your website.
Audio: Audio can be a great source of content for your website. There are a number of occasions when it is every bit as useful for your audience to see it in writing. The following might be a good fit for your website:
- Recordings of talks that you have given or have seen people give
- Interviews of important people in your area of work
- Podcasts
Twitter: Twitter is a great place to get back the content that you have been providing. So how do you actually take the content that you have created, and take it back under your control? This post at Stop Design highlights a step by step process to create a browsable, searchable archive of tweets. How wonderful. Stick that on a subdomain, and you at least stand half a chance that Google will index the content you’ve created and give you some recognition. If nothing else, it certainly makes up for the shortcomings in Twitter’s existing search experience.

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7 strategic content tips to help your website grow

Ensure Content Keeps Evolving

Lead with Content not Design

Identify your Tone & Voice

Define Key Themes and Subtopics

Make it evergreen

Align content with business goals

Think Sideways

Mistakes with e-commerce: Poor Website Implementation

Making the checkout too long winded

Over Validating

Friendly Errors

Poor Search Implementation

Slow Site

Google closes the App Gap

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mark Zuckerberg, “A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg”

Rich Data Visualization with Microsoft Chart Control

Where to find great content

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