Archive for January, 2009

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Action List: Start a Footy Tipping Comp

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

footy-tipping

Now this strategy won’t work for every website, but I think that starting a football tipping competition could work wonders for some online businesses.

I thought it was appropriate to raise this as a possibility, given that the AFL and NRL football season is not too far away…and I was prompted to do so by an email this week from FootyTips.com.au - here’s the text:

The Footy season is almost here – use footy tipping as a powerful marketing tool

Drive traffic to your website and build client relationships in a fun interactive way, with your own branded footy tipping competition.

The footy season is almost here – and now is the time to start planning your footy tipping marketing solution to promote your products and/or services.

How can footy tipping help your business?

  • Drive regular traffic to your website
  • Provides opportunities to promote your products
  • Establish and build an email database
  • Interact and build strong client relationships

Now, you can administer your own tipping competition manually, if you wish.  But, in my book,  that’s far too onerous.  It’s best to use an existing online tipping system, like FootyTips.com.au.

FootyTips.com.au offers branded solutions from around $6,000, but if you’re a small business that can’t afford this amount, you can simply set up an unbranded competition on the FootyTips.com.au website for free. 

So, who would benefit from a football tipping competition?  Localised and community websites, distinctly Australian websites, and sites that sell products to a demographic that aligns or overlaps with a football demographic (eg sports books, beer mugs)

A printing house, The Printing Hub,  here in Adelaide runs a footy tipping comp each year.  The face of their business is Brownlow Medallist and ex-Hawthorn player John Platten, so they create a good deal of interest in their tipping comp by having him involved.  As a customer, I receive a short, weekly email from John with information about the tipping comp – who’s leading the charge, who tipped poorly, etc. – a good little marketing strategy that keeps The Printing Hub at top of mind.

Some tips for your tipping comp:

  • Don’t leave it too late – you need to be recruiting people now for your tipping comp.  One or two weeks before the season starts is not enough lead time to recruit a decent pool of tippers.
  • Offer a worthwhile prize – a $1000 prize will attract lots of new prospects to your website as word of mouth spreads.
  • Consider offering weekly prizes as this gives you a reason to keep in contact with the tippers throughout the season, and an excuse to send out a regular email newsletter.  It also encourages those who do poorly in the first few rounds of the football season to continue tipping each week, because they still have a chance of winning something.  Offering a prize for last place will also help.
  • Actively promote your competition on your website’s home page, in email newsletters and via social networking websites.
  • Make sure that you put some metrics in place  so that you can get some idea of the value of the competition to your business – eg. measure the clickthroughs from the footy tipping site to your own site using a unique URL.  Be aware that there are many ‘compers’ out there who join hundreds of competitions and rarely transact with the host business.  If you use the unbranded version of FootyTips.com.au, then you will attract these people, as it is possible to enter multiple tipping competitions simultaneously via the FootyTips.com.au website.

Happy tipping!

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Action List: Check out how many of your pages are indexed by Google

Friday, January 30th, 2009

google

It is important to know which pages the search engines have indexed on your site.  Not only does it allow you to tweak your TITLE tags, page copy and metadata, but it also gives you an indication of how your search engine optimisation efforts are going over time and how good your competitors are at SEO too.

To see how many of your pages are indexed in Google, type the following into Google Search:

site:your URL

A search using site:www.boomerangbooks.com returns 7510 results.  My competitors, Dymocks, have over 149,000 results, so I have some work to do.

As you can see, it’s also a useful tool for checking up on your competitors.

Here are some other operators that you can use in Google to obtain information about your listings:

  • link:<URL> – provides a list of websites that link to your website.
  • cache:<URL> – the cached image of the website that is currently on file at Google.
  • info:<URL> – the information that Google currently holds about the website.
  • related:<URL> – pages that are similar to your website.

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Action List: Carry business cards

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

business-card

Although you might be an internet entrepreneur who lives much of his/her life online, it doesn’t mean that you won’t ever interact with people in the ‘real world’ (and I encourage you to get out there and speak to ‘real people’).  When you do, it’s important that you have a good quality business card to hand over.

Business cards are relatively inexpensive and you won’t need thousands of them – in fact, I have about 7-8 boxes of old business cards from previous jobs in a storage box at home that I never got round to giving out…I’m sure you do too.   It seems that a minimum print run is never below 500!

It’s important that your card is well designed, is in keeping with the online nature of your business (ie. not staid and boring, as many business cards are), and mirrors the graphical elements that make up your website. Remember that branding needs to be uniform throughout your collateral – business cards, website, email signatures, advertisements, flyers, etc.

What ever you do – don’t opt for a templated business card – get one custom designed (try elance for inexpensive designers).  Templated business cards look tacky and unprofessional.

The card should contain all of the necessary contact details and your website URL. If it’s appropriate to your business, consider including your Instant Messaging ID (eg. Skype, ICQ or MSN Messenger), as well as the standard telephone, fax, email and postal details.  You might even consider adding your IDs for other networking sites, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, if you do business via these channels.

For printing, I recommend using a local printer.  There are services online that provide printed business cards – like Vistaprint – but it’s not possible to gauge the quality of the print job beforehand – again, business cards printed on poor quality card look unprofessional.   If you deal with a local printer you can request proofs of the work before having the entire print run done.  That said, Vistaprint and others are good for small print runs of promotional material (eg Christmas cards).

When receiving business cards from others, always make notes about the individual on the back of the card, so that you don’t forget who they are – particularly if you are attending a networking event and you are meeting lots of different people. If appropriate, send a follow up email several days after meeting the person. This can often be a great source of business leads. Store all contact details in Microsoft Outlook or an online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, and try to link to the person on LinkedIn. 

I use a combination of LinkedIn, Outlook and Interspire’s Email Marketer, instead of maintaining a physical card file of every business card I’ve ever collected.

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Action List: Utilise the DESCRIPTION meta tag

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

tags

Metadata tags - normally located at the top of your HTML page - contain information about your website that is invisible to the user.  The DESCRIPTION tag provides a description of what that page is about – this tag remains an important indexing variable for the search engines. 

Indeed, whilst the text might not be visible on your own website, some search engines display the DESCRIPTION tag in their search engine results pages (SERPs), so it’s important that this tag exists and contains a good description of the web page.

Some tips:

  • Make sure that every page has a unique DESCRIPTION tag, written specifically for that page.
  • The tag should be about 140 characters or 20 words in length
  • Include keywords in the tag – but don’t repeat terms more than twice
  • Use the DESCRIPTION tag to offer keyword variations (eg. if you run a jewellery website, you might include the American spelling of jewelry in the tag) as the tag is not visible to the user – but remember it can often be found in the search engine listing for your site).

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Action List: Employ the three (or preferably two) click rule

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

click

Some search engines won’t look beyond the home page when indexing your site.  Others will delve a little deeper but still won’t index the entire site.   It can be really frustrating when your best content goes un-spidered.

To give your content  the best chance of being indexed, it’s good practice to make every page in your site accessible within three clicks (preferably two) of the home page.   If you bury your content deeper, then it may not be found.

A great way to do this is to employ a HTML Site Map page that contains links to all pages in your website.  As long as your Site Map is accessible from your website’s home page, then your pages should be discoverable by the search engines.

Another alternative is to publish an XML sitemap (I use XML-Sitemaps.com to build these on the server) of your content and point to the sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools, Windows Live Search Webmaster Centre and Yahoo! Site Explorer.  This will ensure that information about content is ‘pushed’ to the major search engines, giving it a better chance of discovery when the search engine bots and spiders come crawling.  Be sure to update your sitemap regularly, particularly if you run a content site that is frequently updated.

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Action List: Use Google’s Webmaster tools

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

google

Google is the king of the search engines. So when Google offers you a set of webmaster tools to assist you with your listings in Google, you would be silly not to use them, wouldn’t you?

With Google Webmaster Central and Webmaster Tools you can learn how Google ranks websites, how to submit all of your content to Google and how to improve traffic to your site.

Webmaster Central can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. There are a bunch of excellent resources for every webmaster on this page.

Google’s Webmaster Tools can be found at Webmaster Central. These tools can assist you with statistics, diagnostics and management of Google’s indexing of your website, including sitemap submission and reporting.

To get started you will need to specify your website URL and then verify that you are the owner of that site (you will be required to add some code or a file to your website for recognition by Google). From there, you can diagnose how well your site is being indexed by Google, view statistics, learn which sites link to yours, get information about keywords used to find your site, specify sitemaps, and generate a robots.txt indexing file.

Sitemaps are relatively new to the web world. These are XML files that reside on the top level of your domain and which contain a listing of all pages in your site. These files make life easier for Google’s indexing spiders because they tell the spiders where to look and what to index. They are definitely worth setting up and there are a number of tools that can assist you to do so.   Try XML Sitemaps Generator, a server based generator that can be set up to auto-run periodically on your host.

Similarly, the robots.txt file sits at the top level of your website and directs Google’s spiders to indexable content. Google has a robots.txt generator tool here – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robotsgen.

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Useful Article: Starting your First Blog

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Maintaining a blog is great way to market your online business and a a fantastic search engine optimisation strategy – the search engines love blogs because they are a source of fresh, up-to-date content.  If you write great content and contribute to your blog regularly, then your traffic will grow.

If you have your own web hosting, then you should run a standalone Wordpress installation for your blog – this is fast becoming the standard blogging platform. If you are just starting out, then use the free hosted platform, Wordpress.com. This will enable you to easily port over to a domain-based Wordpress installation at a later time.

Here’s an article that will help you start your first blog:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/01/25/crawl-before-you-walk-6-step-by-step-instructions-for-starting-your-first-blog/

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Nice Twitter counter

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

For those of you who use Twitter, I thought that this little Twitter Counter might look nice on your website…

You can get your own counter, in various colours, here:

http://twittercounter.com/?inc=buttons&username=bluetrain

Here’s the article that features the Twitter Counter – there are some other great tips here too:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/25/kevin-rose-10-ways-to-increase-your-twitter-followers/

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Action List: ‘Claim’ your blogs in Technorati

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

technorati

Technorati is one of the many blog search, bookmarking and tagging websites that have proliferated on the web in recent years, although it is generally regarded by serious bloggers as the most ‘authoritative’ of the bunch.

According to the website, Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As the leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, Technorati indexes more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content.

To get a piece of the action, sign up for a free Technorati account here, complete your profile and then start ‘claiming’ your blogs.  To claim a blog, Technorati provides you with a line of code that you’ll need to paste onto your blog’s home page, so that the Technorati spider can confirm its ownership.

Once you have claimed your blog, it’s a good idea to setup an automated ‘ping’, which automatically alerts Technorati when a new post has been added.   There are instructions on how to do this here: http://technorati.com/developers/ping/.

It’s also important that you display Technorati subscription buttons on your pages that allow people to ‘fave’ your blog.  These buttons are provided in the form of HTML snippets after you ‘claim’.  By displaying these buttons, your blog’s ‘authority’ and ‘fans’ will hopefully increase over time and deliver more traffic to your website.

Open your free account here:

http://www.technorati.com

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Action List: Submit your blog to Google Blog Search

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

google-blog-search

If you have a blog, then you should register it with Google Blog Search.

From Google: Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

More information about Google Blog Search can be found on their help page:  http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/about_blogsearch.html

It’s also worth taking a look at the Google Blog Search Pinging Service.  With this service, your blog software will automatically advise Google of new posts to your blog.  You can find info about the pinging service here: http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/about_pinging.html

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