Many small businesses think they can’t do SEO, or can’t afford someone to do it for them. Here’s a truth: Once you’ve got your on-page SEO done properly (which is all the stuff WITHIN your website, that really your web company should have done for you when they built your site), and you’ve done a few basic things (registered with local directories, got Google to index you), it’s time for off-page SEO. And nowadays, that’s where you can really do loads of things yourself to get traffic to your site.

First, do the numbers
Say you’re a real estate company and you need leads. You have decided that for 100 visitors to your site, you get 2 conversions (i.e. people enquiring/filling in a form). You’ve done this by looking at your Google Analytics stats, to see how many people fill in your form against visitors (You’ve not got Google Analytics? It’s free! Get it added to your site now. It tells you where people come from, in what numbers, what they do on your site, etc.)

Trouble is, you’ve only had 200 visitors in the last month. That’s 4 enquiries. You’d rather have 40. That means you need 2000 visits a month. Where are you going to get the other 1800 from?

The good and the bad of professional SEO
Now I’m not going to tell you that professional SEO companies can’t get you that traffic – they can. They will SEO every property on your site, recommend changes to this, that and the other, buy links from other sites and directories, and generally spend a lot of your cash.

You’ll get the traffic. You may even get more leads. But you know what? You won’t get the 40 you were expecting from your newly found 2000 visitors. Why? Because the SEO company is not – whatever they tell you – truly in touch with your customers: what they do, where they go on the web, who they are etc. So they won’t ge ttraffic that’s as TARGETED as you might like.

You know your customers better than anyone! And it’s up to you to go and find them… The best bit is, you simply need to use your common sense and work at it. Here are just three ideas. when you get a feel for what you’re doing, you’ll realise that all of this is just an extension of normal marketing and normal networking:

1. Join as many forums as you can where your customers hang out. Don’t know where they hang out? Ask them! Don’t hard sell – just offer your expert advice, and where applicable, a link to your website. (You can put your website in the forum signature, so they can find you if they want without any need for a “hard sell”.)
2. Find a popular blog that covers what you sell, and add comments to the blog posts where you have something constructive to give. Show your expertise (again, without any hard sell – although there’s nothing wrong with adding your website or a link to a page on it where applicable) and respect the conversation
3. Join and participate in Facebook Groups in your area – type relevant topics into the Facebook search bar, and browse the groups that appear – join and participate in any that are relevant and popular, offering useful material that maybe the other members don’t have, thanks to your professional position.

See a link in all the above? It’s giving, not taking. Give advice, support, encouragement and information, and people will come to you when they want what you’re selling.

Pennies make pounds
You may say “Should I really be engaging with one or two people in this way when I need 1000s of new visitors?”, but it’s my experience that win an evangelist and you win many of their friends too.

Soon, if you’re diligent about your “outreach” programme online and you are also patient, the snowball will start and you’ll have 1000s of genuine visitors, who fill in that form of yours far more often than two times in 100. And no big SEO company fees.

By Phil Morse

It can be quite frustrating when it seems someone invents a new means of communication seemingly every 6 months or so! Just when people managed to understand Facebook, along came Twitter. Marketing people and business people have been trying to find ways of monetising it ever since.

Well, here’s one way. It assumes you at least know how to use Twitter on a personal level, like it or hate it. (For instance, you started an account and had a go for a bit.) If this is where you’re at, the following may be able to help you and your business.

• Sign up for an account in your company name, or (if your name doesn’t clearly state what you do), with a name that says what you do: “FenceFitter”, “PregnancyAdvice” etc.
• Start Tweeting business related things 10-20 times a day – some of which should be “retweets” of interesting tweets from other people about your sector, and some of which should be links to interesting and business-related things you’ve found on the web.
• When you have done this for a few days (so you have a few score tweets under your belt), start following people. A proportion of these will follow you back. At this stage, think about what having 10,000 followers on Twitter could do for you. For instance, if you’re a seed seller, you want gardeners following you, etc. To find relevant people, use Twitter Search to find people saying words that your demographic may say. (So for gardeners, search for people using the word “gardening”, or “been in the garden”, or “planting seeds” etc. You get the picture. Click on the person’s profile before you follow, though, to double check: “uphill gardener” means something very different to “gardener”, for instance!)
• Do this daily, forever. Should only take 10-15 minutes when you’re into the swing. Every now and then, cull people who never follow you back or never engage with you.
• According to the business parable “the Go-Giver”, the first two of the five “Stratospheric Success Laws” are: Give more in value thank you take in payment (the takeaway here is to answer your followers’ queries online, to make sure you help them out), and “Your income is determined by how many people you serve….” (so keep at it, you want 1,000, then 10,000…

With 10,000 Twitter followers who think you’re worth knowing, there’s no reason why the occasional sales email saying “First stockists of this year’s X… click here to buy now…” won’t just net you some handsome sales.

But it still makes no sense at all…
Such is Twitter, that you will either have experienced an “a-ha!” moment here, or be even more confused. That’s fine. It’s a hard one to get your head around, this peer-to-peer marketing. Bit by bit is the key. If it seems a bit too alien, that’s really very normal.

I advise that you simply keep playing with Twitter and come back to this post in six months. By which time there’ll probably be another revolutionary communication tool we’re all trying to monetise!

By Phil Morse

Sponsorship and marketing your business online go hand in hand. In a world where people spend as much time on Facebook and in their email program as browsing commercial websites, having a strategy for getting your company’s name wider than your website is essential, and either of the types of sponsorship outlined below is a great way of doing this.

Charity begins at home
“Give to get” is a proven mantra, and by putting your money behind a local team or charity (or giving your time and expertise: it doesn’t have to be hard cash) you reap the rewards of knowing you’ve used your business to help your community, while hopefully also attracting new customers.

Being in partnership with a suitable local charity gives you a nice, non-commercial aside to add to your company’s web home page; but also, if you sponsor (say) a fundraising event locally, you could expect to get your logo on their web banners, the event’s website, emails/online press releases and blog posts.

Many companies organise their employees and enter teams into charity events, and a reliable way to do so online is to use the biggest charity giving website, www.justgiving.net. This site allows people to sign up to undertake charity events and then get their friends and family to sponsor them online, donating via credit card or PayPal over the internet.

One way the site works is by every individual participant emailing everyone they know, asking them to sponsor them, and then to email their friends too, and so on. This is a form of what’s known as “viral” marketing. It’s good for your company’s brand awareness because every person who receives the call to give some money to the cause is led back to the page your company set up to administer the event, complete with your logo and sponsorship message.

Sponsoring online media
Another smart form of sponsorship is where a company pays to sponsor the activities of another organisation. For instance, say you’re a music promoter. If there happens to be a local website that promotes new bands, has a directory of promoters on it and a busy forum of wannabe musicians, your company could pay for the site’s hosting and email software in order to have a “with the support of…” on the site and in the footer of the email blasts, making clear that the website and email newsletter are produced in association with you.

You gain exposure to a new audience, and hopefully cement your relationship with a disparate range of people within your sector that you may struggle to get positive recognition from in other ways.

Choose your associations wisely
Of course, as with all good marketing, it is the associations you make that will make or break you in all of these areas – and the internet can help in your research

Want some ideas as to what others are doing? Think of the largest company in your sector and type their name into Google or Bing followed by “in partnership with”.

So for instance, if you’re a computer company, you may search for (including quotes) “IBM in partnership with”. This will return sites speaking of IBM’s partnerships, and hopefully giving you some insight into the nature of these arrangements. This should help to trigger ideas for you locally that could produce similar synergies.

This article first appeared in Essential Magazine

Our recent fundraising event was well attended, with many generous prizes donated by local businesses including a signed Premiership football shirt, a designer vase, a hamper, and a pile of booze and chocolates. Reedus Design pledged to double everything raised, and Unicef officially received our donation of £705/€810 on 2 February. Thanks again to all who attended.

Local to our head office in Spain? Come and help us to party for a cause…  have a drink, listen to some great music and raise some money for Unicef and their Haiti relief effort at our “Collecting for Haiti” event, Lee’s Bar, Guadalmina Commercial Centre, San Pedro de Alcántara, on Thursday 28th January from 8pm to 12am.

There will be collections and a raffle with great prizes. For every euro raised, Reedus Design will match it!

Look forward to seeing you for a great night, and let’s make a difference.

Can’t make it? Donate directly to Unicef today.

We’ve successfully helped many small businesses try online advertising, and can do the same for yours. Now we’re offering a special Pay Per Click Taster to let you see if online advertising can outperform your other forms of advertising over a measured one-month period.

How it works
To start with, we’ll give you a free consultation, examining your market, your goals, your current website and working out the viability of advertising online for you. Assuming your site has the required “call to action” on it as it stands (a form, a “buy now” button next to a product, a phone number, etc), we will then advise which page should be shown when someone clicks on your ad. (If your site doesn’t, we can advise on changes necessary.)

Next, we’ll choose key phrases to trigger your ad, write your adverts, set up the campaign, and monitor it for you.  Of course, you get to OK everything at every stage.

Give it a month and see if it works for you
If you are used to advertising in a monthly publication, let’s try this for one month for your business. The cost is comparable or less, and you may just discover something you’ll wish you’d known years ago.

And the best thing is, we’ll show you what we’re doing and why. If you decide you can do it from there alone, Great! We’ll hand everything over to you. But if you’d rather we carry on managing it for you, we can do so too. It’s your call.

Do it before your competition does! Contact us today.

by Phil Morse