Remember when megapixels kept doubling every year? When memory sizes, processor speeds and screen resolutions kept getting bigger and bigger too? Remember when every new version of your office software came with more menu items, more bells and whistles (and took longer to load, to open, to install)?

Have you notice that all of a sudden, in so many technological areas, all of this seems to have stalled? Here’s some examples:

• YouTube – Videos used to be long, expensively produced things. Here they can only be 10 minutes long, and this site is runaway successful.
• iPad/iPhone – Small screens, smaller memory, yet these things will be the big sellers this Christmas. The point is, however, that we are using these devices instead of our huge computers, even instead of our laptops.
• MP3s & MP3 players – Everyone said the low sound quality of MP3s would mean they wouldn’t catch on. Wrong! With the Shuffle, there’s not even a screen. People love them.
• Windows 7 – For the first time, the world’s most popular operating system has actually got smaller, not bigger (after the behemoth that was Vista).
• Software-as-a-service – Google Docs, Hotmail and other online, stripped-down versions of traditionally deskbound programsare replacing Outlook, Word and the like for many people. Faster, lightweight, simpler…

When did “good enough” replace “bigger, faster, better”? Whenever it was, it is now arguably starting to inform everything we do in our technological lives, and so much of what we do as web developers here at Reedus Design.

Designing for the majority
For instance, we’re developing mobile applications – for iPhones and the like. As we do, we strip away features necessarily, to fit the smaller screen, loading speeds etc. And we’re finding this “less is more” approach is helping us even more than before to focus on what’s really important for the end user.

As we design current products for real estate companies, betting firms, foreign exchange companies, our mantra is increasingly: “Is this feature really necessary?”

Maybe this has all come about because people got so busy that something had to give. Maybe it’s Pareto’s Principle – the 80/20 rule, stating that 80% of people only use 20% of features. Whatever, it seems increasingly obvious that something has caused us, as a culture, to subliminally re-evaluate what we really need from out technology on a day-to-day basis, and to increasingly reject what is just noise.

All of this means that excellent design, great usability and “good enough” are more and more informing the cutting edge, and “stuffing everything you can imagine in to a product just for the sake of it” is becoming an outdated philosphy of product design.

Frugal times are proving interesting at the cutting edge of design and technology!

Especially somewhere with as tight a community as the Costa del Sol, it’s a great idea to use social networking tools, and Twitter in particular, to find new business.

Still not sure what Twitter is? If you’ve got used to Facebook, think of Twitter as a stripped-down version that lets you send text-message length updates (and not much else). It has two big differences though: firstly, you don’t need permission to follow people, and secondly, everything everyone says is public.

So if you imagine Twitter as a really big room with a massive pool of people in it, many of whom are your potential customers, how do you “tune in” to what may be benficial to you? There are various ways:

1. Set up searches for key terms – This means that any time anyone mentions (for instance) “plumber” and any of a list of areas that you cover, you get alerted. (Twitter has lots of useful third-party applications that let you use its service effectively, and my favourite – called Tweetdeck, and free – installs on your PC and lets you do just this.) You can then tweet them back with the solution to their problem there and then – you!

2. Build up a network of local people and businesses – Just by searching for the name of your town or area you’ll find lots of people to “follow” who are local. You can click on their profiles to see if you like the look of them, or to check if there’s a chance they may be potential clients. You’re not looking to sell to them now – just to get “closer to them in the room”.

Another great way to find such people is to follow their followers/followed people; on Twitter, you can see all this information, and it’s fine to follow people because they’re following or followed by someone else.

3. Be helpful and reap the rewards A very powerful part of Twitter is the “retweet”, or “RT” for short. If someone says: “Anyone know why the A7 is shut today in Marbella?”, and you know, tell them on Twitter. They may well RT your post to their network of friends. some of those people may do the same… and before you know it, your post is helping loads of people, all of whom may click on your name, read your profile, decide they like you, and follow you.

See how this works? You build up a network of people you loosely know or are interested in, all of whom are likely to read what you write. The ideas is to be friendly, useful (posting links to websites, or retweeting other interesting stuff helps here), and to trust that when you can help someone commerically, you’ll be “front of mind”.

Get used to it!
Twitter is a brave new world for many, but once you make your first sale through it, you’ll have a strategy that you know works, and which you can build on.

Don’t expect results immediately and do 15-20 minutes every day. There’s no right or wrong way to use it; the only real rule is not to annoy people, or they’ll unfollow you and you’ll have lost the chance to pitch them your goods or services for ever.

Remember the “early” days of the web? If you can recall the time leading up to the dotcom crash of 2001, everyone wanted a website, nobody knew quite why, and web companies from the best in the business to fly-by-nights were picking up work left, right and centre building sites, the vast majority of which of course cost a lot and delivered very little.

As the web has grown up, and businesses have attached metrics to web performance, the web has become a more stable and useful tool for delivering performance – whether that is leads, sales or “eyeballs” – all of which is ultimately full measurable. This way, businesses have learned where to spend their marketing “bucks” online.

Tomorrow’s web is portable
Fast forward to right now. The iPhone is the ubiquitous “cool” mobile, with millions sold. For many more people than that, Google’s Android smartphone operating system is powering their phone, offering much the same “mini-computer” functionality as the iPhone.

Applications like Facebook are exploding in popularity on mobile devices, as are news, accouting, calendar, recipe, sports and a myriad other applications. Add in to this the runaway early success of the iPad, and it’s clear that tomorrow’s web is portable.

I want one of those!
Businesses are thus eyeing mobile “apps” and sites in the same way they eyed the web way back when. And while iPhone, Android, iPad and mobile apps and websites have ther own pitfalls (just like commissioning websites back in the early days did), the fruit is there for the picking: If you can offer your customers something on their portable device that adds to or complements your website, product or service, it is a great idea to get started on building something along these lines for your company.

The key is to be sure you’re adding something, be clear about what you want, and then speak to someone who can help you make it happen, and who can show you a track record of building sites and/or apps for these devices.

That way you’ll get a modern, fresh online presence for your company in all the right people’s pockets – while hopefully avoiding the mistakes of the last internet boom!

By Phil Morse

Big companies have public relations departments to get their message out. Small companies have always been on their own, battling to try and get people to write about them in the trade press and mainstream media. But the internet has changed the rules, and happily it’s the small companies who stand to benefit the most.

Nowadays, you can craft your own direct-to-the-public press releases and get your company’s message to your audience directly via the internet.

Write your own press releases
The way to do this is first to get comfortable writing your own press releases, and then post them with a news release distribution service, who will take your news release and do the electronic version of getting it out to the world, on your behalf, for a small fee.

A good service can get your press release published on hundreds of news site all over the internet, and the outcome is that whenever anyone searches for your type of goods or service, there is a chance that your press release will appear. From there they can click through to you, and you’ve got their eyeballs.

Compare the offerings of PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com), PRWeb (www.prweb.com) and Business Wire (www.businesswire.com) to get a feel for who can help; there are scores of online PR firms to choose from, so Google “online pr” to get some more. You never meet these people; you just upload your release and pay online.

Anything is news with online PR
Because of this ease of distribution, press releases aren’t just for big news any more. You can write a press release for anything you can think of: when you win an award, get a new staff member, win a contract, launch a new product, sponsor a charity…. just write what you’ve done, keep it short, give a quote (“It’s great news, and we’re very proud” said Ian Watkins, general manager) and add some contact details at the bottom. If you’re after inspiration, go to www.docstoc.com and type “press release” into the search box to browse some random releases.

There are other simple rules to follow. You should make your press release appeal directly to your buyers, as unlike the old type of press release, you’re not writing for journalists any more. So for instance, if your opening hours have changed, then say “You can get your breakfast from 6.30pm at Ricky’s Diner now we’ve extended our opening hours…” rather than “Clients can…”
Another important thing is to make the copy “keyword-rich”. To do this, you have to know what people type when they search for you on the internet. (If you don’t know, get someone to check your website logs for you and find out.) Then, you weave these words into your press release. Congratulations, you’ve just become a search engine marketer!

Have a press release area on your website
Finally, once you’ve written and distributed your press release, you ought to post it on your own website too, as it may not remain forever online, and when the news services drop your content from their sites, that means people will still find it when they search for your keywords. If your website has a blog, this is really easy. If not – well, it really ought to have.

Do this even a few times a year and you will find that for your company name and for the names of your products and services, you are suddenly much more visible to potential clients, both locally and further afield. It’s a great way to spend a few hundred euros of your annual marketing budget, and one too few small companies take advantage of.

This article was written by Phil Morse and first published in Essential magazine.

In this brave new online world of social media, web marketing, blogs, affiliate schemes and so on (all of which are fantastic ways of marketing your online business), there is one simple, established marketing method that every single business forgets at its peril: email marketing. Why?

• It is a fast way of meeting business goals – More customers, leads, sales? Get the word out! Let people know about your offers and bargains. Offer up-sell and cross-sell products to customers who’ve already bought from you. Plan it well and you can get high response rates
• It keeps your customers informed and happy – Letting your customers know about little things, like changes to payment conditions, legislation that may affect them, business shortcuts and so on, shows them you care
• It’s cheap – Start stuffing envelopes and licking stamps and you’ll soon see the cost-effectiveness of targeted direct email marketing campaigns. With proper frequencies, follow-up emails and good timing (just like old-fashioned postal direct marketing) you can get great results for a relatively small outlay
• It teaches you about your customers – You can measure everything from whether the email addresses are correct to which part of the email each individual customer clicked on. So you can gauge the popularity of your offers, down to individual customer level
• It helps you with all your other online marketing – Remember the social media, web marketing, blogs and affiliate schemes we mentioned earlier? All of these can deliver great results for your business, and can do so even more effectively with statistical feedback from your email marketing campaigns

Reedus Design has a simple, effective and fully featured pay-as-you-go email system that is delighting many clients already. It has easy templates, full feedback of results and lots of other profit-friendly features. Contact us for more details.

Your blog is one of the best tools you have for getting people to your website, and thus for getting new customers and increasing profits. Here’s how this type of marketing works:

• By posting new content onto your blog, you show your “know your beans” to your potential customers, and you attract the search engines (they love new content)
• By properly promoting your content online, you start attracting the right kind of web traffic quickly
• By linking from your blog posts to your product or service pages, this traffic then arrives right where you can convert it into customers

The beauty is that the more effort you put in, the more traffic you get – and once you have a blog, it’s free (apart from your time of course.) If you don’t have a blog, you ought to consider getting one. Contact us for a free, no-obligation consultation.

It’s a system, and it works, but there are no shortcuts. You have to plan properly and then enact your plan well. Here is a brief overview of the steps you should be taking to establish your blog profitably:

1. Decide on your keywords. Your blog has to attract the search engines, so list all the keywords (and that includes short phrases, or “key phrases”) you want your business to appear for when people type them in to Google, and plan a blog post for each key phrase (you can have 2 or 3 per blog post, that’s fine)
2. Plan your content. Your blog has to keep your audience happy once they get there. So plan interesting/useful posts for each key phrase or set of key phrases. These posts should not be overly commercial; they should show your knowledge of your products, services and sector. Of course, you will link at the end of each post to your shop / product / service, which is how the blog feeds traffic into your commerical offerings
3. Write your content. Aim for one post a week and stick to your plan. In our experience, any less looks like your blog is an afterthought, and any more is unsustainable for busy business people. Incorporate the keywords for that post into the content, in headlines, subheadings, and the content itself. Aim for three occurrences of the keyword(s) in each post, but keep it natural; “keyword packing” is counter-productive. Don’t fret too much about this; by writing around the subject you have chosen for your key phrases(s), you’ll naturally use them anyway. If you ignore key phrase(s) entirely, you’ll still get some results
4. Register your blog on blog directories. Type “blog directory” into Google and register it on as many services as you find
5. Join web forums. These are online message boards where people discuss the same products / services / subjects that your blog does, and comment usefully and in a non-commercial manner on what they’re talking about. (Type “forum” and your business type or subject area in to Google to find them; you’ll soon get a feel for the dominant forums in your sector.) Post a few times before you start linking back to your site. You can link back to individual blog posts that are relevant to discussions and you can sometimes add your blog (and shop) to your forum signature. Follow the rules and be useful. Forums aren’t about plugging without adding value
6. Every time you post, publicise your latest entry on social media services. Post the fact that you’ve added a blog entry to your Facebook page, on Twitter, to Delicious and any social media/bookmarking services that are particular to your sector too. Don’t forget that you can also set up an RSS feed so people who visit your blog can subscribe to your posts too

Remember, this is a numbers and time game. The more you promote your blog, the more traffic you get. Use Google Analytics to monitor traffic to your blog overall and from the forums, and direct your efforts where you are getting the best results. Expect some traffic in days or weeks; decent volumes takes months, but once it’s “switched on”, it’s yours and it’s free.

Contact us for a free, no-obligation quotation to get a blog for your site, or to learn better how to make your existing blog work for you.