SpeedieConsulting

There are several tools available that can help you manage your online “presence”, from tools to manage your Twitter account requests and auto tweet on messages. From those to help you manage your many various social media profiles and those simply there to deal with customer support issues or enquiries.

Getting your website to work harder for you is a great way to maximise efforts while minimising time. Talking with potential clients in the last two weeks has reminded me of the real benefits of running a website using Wordpress. Not only do you get a state of the art, updatable, feature rich content management system (for free), you get a whole raft of plugins which allow you to automate some of the more mundane processes.

Now a quick message from the dark side before we continue. Some of the techniques we will discuss can and have been abused. This is not the goal. The goal is to allow you to produce marketing messages or web content and then consistently syndicate them in the right places, all the while building your business in the long term.

Wordpress for example has plugins that will allow you to upload a huge amount of content or convert data files into blog posts, so you “could” build lots of web pages really quickly and then syndicate that across the web. That is a bad idea. What we suggest you do, is have content prepared and then uploaded it so that the content goes live every few days. Making sure the content is unique and not just a churned spreadsheet. In this way, during a lean period or when you get a bit of time you can prepare content, add it to your site and then forget about it for a while.

Other plugins will take a post and notify your twitter followers as soon as it goes live. This is a great tool as it cuts out the little things you will not do consistently. There are other plugins that will notify Facebook too.

Sitemap plugins will automatically update themselves when new content is added and then send themselves off to the major search engines, plus they can create a useful page on the site for visitors too. These are all automatic.

There are tools to auto submit your content to a random selection of social bookmarking accounts. Again this can and has been abused.

The Wordpress RSS feeds that are automatically created and maintained by the system also have huge potential for syndicating your content across the web. We wrote about some “tricks” with Wordpress RSS feeds here:

http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/a-couple-of-tricks-with-wordpress-rss-feeds/

As you can see, we really rave about Wordpress. For a small business, we can’t think of another system that can do some much for you automatically and consistently.

Another tool you can and should look into, autoresponders. These are great tools that do a lot of your initial customer contact, support and deal with enquiries. We have written about these before:

http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/how-would-you-like-to-have-an-extra-pair-of-hands-to-help-handle-your-incoming-enquiries/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/using-autoresponders-in-your-business/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/services/autoresponder-courses/

You can also integrate Autoresponders with Wordpress like we do on our websites.

Finally,  we have been trialling Hummingbird for Twitter and Hootsuite.  Hummingbird is a great little tool as you can set it to search the “Twitosphere” looking for tweets and people who have a  common interest and then sends them a follow rewquest, if they follw you back it keeps the link, if not after a while it will remove it.  This is a good way to manage some parts of your twitter account.

Hootsuite has a huge range of tools  but the one we love is the ability to preload a spreadsheet of tweets and set them to go out at a a date in the future.  So you can set up daily or weekly marketing messages to be published on your twitter account.  This is not to replace your normal activity but gives you a way of being consistent.

Hopefully this ramble has given you some food for thought. Want to share a useful tool that does some heavy lifting in your business? Please share…

The Internet is a big place – a very big place….

According to Kelkoo (a shopping price comparison site) the UK online market grew to £38 billion in 2009. The report, carried out by the Centre for Retail Research, predicts a 12.4% growth in online UK spending in 2010, bringing the total to £42.7 billion.

The research also showed that UK shoppers are increasingly confident about online shopping. The proportion of people prepared to spend £1,000 or more in a single transaction rose from 12% to 25%.

Using this as a back drop, it is easy to see why more and more companies are looking online for their customers. Are you?

While some think marketing online is simply having a website, sadly this is not the end of the story. I in fact it is more like the introduction.

As a way of introduction to internet marketing , online marketing techniques for attracting customers include:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (Pay Per Click)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Media Buying
• Article Marketing
• Blog Marketing
• Forum Marketing

This list goes on and on, as more and more companies create and release technology that allows us to better interact and communicate with potential customers.

Now for a smaller sized company this can appear quite daunting but the fact is that the Internet has been a great leveller of the marketing field, with smaller companies being able to not only compete but dominate certain niches online.

And not because they spend more money than the next guy, but because they understand the best ways to attract customers on a better ROI. Sometimes smaller can be better – as they can move faster and react quicker. Think Speed Boat – not Super Tanker!

Some of the techniques above will return a better ROI than others. Affiliate marketing for example is a great way for companies to attract business on a good ROI and just as important on a low risk model. Set up correctly, marketing costs are “paid for” when the customer has bought the final product.

Even within a single technique such as Affiliate marketing, there are a raft of possible payment models.

• pay per click ;
• pay per visit;
• pay per view;
• cost per action;
• cost per lead;
• cost per acquisition;
• cost per sale.

As you can see there are a wide range of options to attract business to your site and how you pay for it. If you know how well your site performs at converting traffic to sale or enquiry, you may feel comfortable with any number of these options.

If you are new to this but see the benefits it may be best to look at a cost per sale option which means you pay a flat fee or %commission when the product is bought.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to attract business and leverage other company’s expertise to drive you traffic and sales.

If you are struggling to get traffic from local listings in Google, Bing and Yahoo, then you really need to start submitting your site to a range of local based directories. Services such as the Google business centre (or center for our US readers) are a great easy way to start getting traffic from some of the local search phrases relevant to your  business. These sites tend to featured highly in local search within Google especially so take out some time and signup with some of the directories listed.

Here is a small list of some of the best local based services your site needs to be featured on, in order to maximise your chances of getting traffic and business from local search. I have broken these down into US and UK as there will be no benefit or in some cases way for UK sites to submit to some of the US sites with out a US postal address.

UK Local Directories

Bing – https://ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx
BT Tradespace – http://www.bttradespace.com
City Local – http://www.citiylocal.co.uk
Free Index – http://www.freeindex.co.uk
Google Business Center – http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?hl=en-US&gl=GB
HotfrogUK – http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk/AddYourBusiness.aspx
My Local Services – http://www.mylocalservices.co.uk
The Best of – http://www.thebestof.co.uk
Touch Local – http://www.touchlocal.co.uk
Yahoo- http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php

US Local Directories

CitySearch.com – http://www.citysearch.com
Google Maps – http://maps.google.com
InsiderPages.com – http://www.insiderpages.com
Local.com – http://www.local.com
SuperPages.com – http://www.superpages.com
Yahoo Local – http://local.yahoo.com
Yelp – http://www.yelp.com

If you are just starting out with your online marketing efforts and are looking for ways to build an online presence, now is the perfect time to leap frog your competition by using WordPress. Wordpress is simple to use, easy to install and fantastic for automating processes – including marketing. But we will get to that.

WordPress is free to install although initially you may wish to pay someone to install it for you and set it up.

So why should you use Wordpress?

There are two main reasons why this is a good way to go. Firstly, Wordpress is heavily used and supported.  There are a huge number of designers out there that can put together a great looking website for you at a low cost.  Uploading a new design or changing a design is a simple case of uploading files to your web server and that’s it.  One change and it will be implemented across the site.

Secondly, and in our minds more importantly, you can install plugins. Plugins are like small bits of code that carry out tasks on your website.  There are plugins that allow you to have enquiry forms, there are plugins that create sitemaps and submit them to Google for you each time a post or page is added to the site.

This means that you can set up these plugins to take care of a lot of the marketing activities you would normally spend time doing yourself (or rather you would forget to do consistently).

The main marketing plugins we recommend to our clients can:

• Auto Tweet any posts as they go live on your Website
• Bulk upload a whole years’ supply of Content to your website ad have it drip feed for the next 12 months
• Auto post your content to your Facebook Profile or Fan pages
• Auto bookmark your content to a range of social bookmarking sites

Just these 4 plugins alone will save your lots of time and allow you to really maximise the benefits of your website.

There are even plugins that can turn a website into a classified ads site, an article directory, a membership site or even enable you to run your own social networking site.  Investing in a WordPress site and learning how to use it properly will allow you not only to run a single website for your business, but will empower you to run several sites, all out there driving leads to your business.

If you are looking at creating a web presence for your business, now really is the time to look at WordPress. It can be so much more than just a blogging tool.

We do get lots of enquiries about doing different types of work for different clients and one thing that always seems to crop up is the “oh I do all the marketing myself” type response.

We see lots of businesses do this but with actually taking care of what you do best, i.e. selling insurance, it can be difficult to get everything done and it all suffers.

We thought it is worthwhile to describe what we see is an ideal Internet marketing department so you can get a feel for the amount of roles / work that “could” be involved. It should also give you an idea of the skill sets needed.

Now we should point out that not everything needs do by a separate person. We are not saying go out and hire 10 people, but it gives you an idea why sometimes that when you are working your socks off with marketing your business online, you never seem finished! Also this might give you pause to think about outsourcing some of this stuff to outside agencies.

Here are the roles we see (in no particular order…)

SEO Manager
Your SEO manager is the person responsible for getting your site listed higher in the major search engines. They will have some technical skills but will also know all the techniques required to get your site more traffic. They could also be responsible for your Social media campaigns such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Skills include: Copy Writing, Link Building, Web Page Construction, SEO

PPC Manager
Your PPC manager will be responsible for building and managing your pay per click campaigns. They will need to understand and monitor pay per click spend and conversions. They will be split testing and testing constantly. They will also be looking at more ways to get your PPC spend down without loss of traffic. This could involve running PPC on second tier PPC engines

Skills include: PPC Setup, Keyword Research, Traffic Analysis, Landing Page Conversion

Email Marketer
The email marketer in this team will be responsible for two things. Building a mailing list of new potential clients and keeping in touch with them regularly to convert them into clients. Secondly they will need to build and manage a system for keeping your current clients in touch with what you do via a newsletter and ongoing promotional messages.

Skills include: Copy Writing, List Building Skills, CRM Skills and Web Design Skills

Affiliate Manager
You affiliate manager will be tasked with attracting more affiliates to your affiliate programme and managing all the relationships with them. They will also be tasked with  encouraging them to more sales. They will also be responsible for attracting new affiliates and partners. They could also be accountable for any referral or major partner business.

Skills include: Affiliate Management, Creative, and Web Design Skills

Webmaster / Web Developer
Your webmaster will be put upon the most if I am fair. This role will be responsible for maintaining your website and web services, and also assisting the other members of the team to carry out their jobs. This could be a designer and a technical developer rolled into one or it could be two roles.

Skills: Web Design, Web Development, and much more…

Now you have seem the roles in your internet marketing team, you will now understand why you get snowed under or don’t feel like you are getting anywhere with it. In some businesses all of this work can be carried out by one person with help from outsourcing to other companies. Or some of the team members are not used. There are some companies that don’t have an affiliate programme or run any email campaigns.

Anyway the point of this post is to give you some idea of the kinds of things you can be doing and the skill sets involved. And where you see gaps in your skill set you can look to outsource the work.

If you are looking for a low cost, low risk solution to drive more traffic and leads to your site then an affiliate programme could be the right thing to look at next. Now affiliate programmes don’t just have to be for big brands. Any business can run an affiliate programme. If you have a budget you could go to a network and run a programme via them, or if you want to run something a bit more low key and low cost you can run your own.

There are plenty of off the shelf solutions you can implement to run your own affiliate programme. We have used both iDevAffiliate and HasOffers for managing and running all the tracking and signup processes needed to manage an affiliate programme.

These options are both low cost and give you a huge amount of functionality, allowing you to fully manage any number of affiliates and it can even sort payments out via PayPal to take that worry away too.

A couple of ideas for running a low key programme

• Look for partnering with local businesses
• Turn your business referral programme into a full affiliate programme
• Look for affiliates in a given niche or topic
• Use your business contacts (Facebook / LinkedIn) and run a programme for them

In this way you can start to make inroads in to running a successful affiliate programme.

Some more reading:

Affiliate Programmes
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/services/affiliate-programmes/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/an-easy-low-cost-way-to-run-a-referral-programme/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/affiliate-marketing-thoughts/

Tips
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/top-affiliate-marketing-tips-for-insurance-and-mortgage-brokers/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/does-your-affiliate-programme-need-a-makeover/

For a limited time only EuroFerret is opening its doors to new submissions.

We are a highly specialised web directory accepting submissions from quality merchant and affiliate websites in the insurance, loans, banking, savings, mortgages, investments and personal finance spaces. We also accept submissions from Insurance and Finance companies.

Let us help you connect with more customers. Features include a 5,000 character company description, company logo, direct link to your site, one “in content” link, direct email facility and location map.

Accepted submissions are permanent.

There is a one-off £35 review fee.

To submit your website you first need to register for a free account: Register Here

Read the Submission Guides here: Submission Guidelines

One way to dip your toe in the world of affiliate or referral marketing, to test whether it is a real viable option, is to setup a low cost local solution.   Now we are going to make a few assumptions at the outset:

• The referral will be a completed form online
• The referral will be for a quotation for services (Life Insurance Quote / Link Building Quote) – whatever
• The referral will not be a “Buy Online”  transaction (Although I have an idea for that too)
• The referral partners will be local businesses (Although this could work nationwide)

So the referral activity will be getting other companies to send you referrals for Life Insurance.

You have a website with a quote form, that visitors complete to allow you to quote.  Now if you simply ask all your referral partners to send people to that same form, you will not be able to tell where the referral form came from?  So how will you be able to reconcile and pay referral fees?

No good.

So the easiest way is to replicate the forms and create a unique form for each referral partner. Then change the  subject line of that form to say something like

“Life Insurance Referral  from Joes Real Estate”.

It this way, if you have 10 leads come into your email box you can quickly see where they have come from. So you can now work out how to pay or thank  for the referral.

Now you have each referral form on it’s own page, you can also now add their logo and details to it to make it more “friendly” or include a message on the page some thing like:

“Hey we know you have just been referred by Joes Real Estate.”

Now this only really works with up to say 10- 20 referral partners but if you wanted to set up a referral scheme with a bunch of local businesses, this could be a great way of doing it.

And it is very low cost.  No technical software requirements at this stage, you can build something quickly.  You can even find a bunch of potential referral partners, build the forms for each one ahead of time and when you speak to them you can send them a copy of their form and start asking for referrals straight away.

If you make them worth something too say a commission per form or % commission completed business.

Why would they say no?

If you are looking at trying affiliate or referral marketing on a bigger scale why not give this solution a go first before spending lots of money on a solution that might not be needed.

I am not sure if you realised but anyone that has a wordpress site that has multiple categories, has multiple RSS feeds. Each category of your blog has it’s own RSS feed. Now you maybe think that there is no real power in that but let me tell you, you’re wrong. Here are a couple of ideas you can use to get your targeted traffic to your site using category RSS Feeds.

Squidoo and Hubpages
Import category RSS feeds into Squidoo and Hubpages that are relevant to one category. Have a lens or hubpage on car insurance AND have a category on your blog on car insurance, then import the car insurance feed.

This keeps the pages all totally focused on one thing.

Facebook and LinkedIn
You can also do the same thing with Facebook pages too! Why not have a fan page on each of your core products and add in the individual category feed as notes. Again it keep the content for that page highly focused.

Another “trick” is the hidden category. You can add a category to your site called say “Facebook”, then:

• Exclude from your theme navigation – so direct visitors can’t see it.
• Exclude it from your robots.txt using the Sitemap generator plugin – so Google doesn’t see it.

Then add that RSS feed to your facebook page. In this way facebook fans gets totally unique content that you can only see via your facebook page. For you, you are still managing all your content in one place.

You can also do the same kind of thing with:

• A Special Offers feed
• Creating categories for any of your other Social activity
• Running a newsletter can also be done using a hidden category and an autoresponder service (such as AWeber or GetResponse)

You can do the same thing with LinkedIn if you have a company page. You can import a Blog feed onto your company page so use a “LinkedIn” category like we did with Facebook and then your content on this feed can be targeted towards LinkedIn users.

The beauty is you can put a lot of this on autopilot if you future date stamp posts and do a lot of work in bulk.

Get a lot of stuff on upfront and then let it run. You then just need to “top up”content as and when.

As you can see, Wordpress can be more than just a simple blog.  It can be a whole system for managing your social media activity.

I hope this gives you some food for thought.

Are you running an affiliate programme?

Do all your landing pages replicate your main website?

If they do you could have lots of leaks and lots of leaks could be costing you lots of money.

What do I mean?

Well as affiliates we want to make sure the landing pages gives us the best opportunity to earn a commission, after all that what affiliates are in business for.

So having:

• untrackable phone numbers
• links to news and article sections
• links to other products that don’t generate affiliate commissions

could be really hampering your efforts to attract good quality affiliates and switching off your current affiliates.   As much as possible you need to plug the gaps. That said if you can’t plug them at least put them out of the way or reduce the size of them so the main focus is the affiliate sale.

The same can be said for your own PPC campaign landing pages.  You are spending the money to attract these visitors, you want them on your buy pages, not zipping around the site.

Why not take some time out and “optimise” your affiliate and ppc landing pages.  A simple vistop you these camapigns could mean the difference between profit and loss.