Web content is one of those things that we all can add to our website, but then what? Simply adding content is not enough. You need to make sure:

• it is keyword rich;
• worth reading;
• easy to read;
• you give people more than one way to find it;
• you need to link to it;
• you need to syndicate it;

If JFK was a internet marketer he would say something like “Ask not what your content can do for you, but rather what you can do for your content!”

With that firmly in mind here are a few ways to get the most out of your content:

Link to it.

This really is a no brainer but if you don’t link to it, how will people find it?   Add links to it from other articles you have written, link to it from your main website.  Add links to it on your blog or social profiles, status updates, there are  huge number of ways to get links to it.

Recycle it.

Can you use it in a free downlodable report or the basis of one?  Can you turn it into a video or presentation which can thenm be updaoed to scribd.com or slideshare.net?  Use a service such as odiogo.com and turn the content into an audio stream automatically.

Support it.

Keep it up to date, change it around, create followups over time and then link back to the original. Do you get asked questions about something in the article? – then update it with a reply.  Obviously this works well on blog posts.

Syndicate it.

Get your content out there. Submit it to Article websites, blog sites, post it on relevant forums, write guest blog posts for other sites.

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See our Latest Payday Loans Client Video

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Check out our Second Speed-e-Loans video.  Please share…

If you are interested in low cost video for your business please get in touch…

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Please enjoy our first ever Web Video for a client. Speed-e-Loans….

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One of the things all companies should have is a batch of content (articles, blog posts and the like) that is sat on your hard drive ready to react to anything. This content reminds me of a Sunday cookup, where you make up a whole batch of food and stick it in the freezer only to get it out when you need it.

Now it is a great idea to have a content cookup too. Take out some time (not necessarily Sunday) and write some articles, blog posts, paragraphs, anything you can think of. You can then “freeze” these in a directory on your hard drive. In this way, when opportunity arises or you need some content, you have some you can use straight away. Or you can grab some snippets and turn them into something you can use.

To give you some ideas, the kinds of things you should be looking to create in your cookup are:

• Web Content – around 500 word mark.
• Blog Content – Anything from 100 to 1,000 words. (Although longer posts should be broken down into multiple posts).
• Guest posts – Again anywhere up to 500 words.
• Article syndication – Over 300 words is good.
• Facebook or LinkedIn updates – These could be random thoughts or small tips.
• Guest Newsletter articles – again around 500 words is a good length

Now you can use the same article for more than one of these areas, but you will get a bigger and better response if you can make each piece that leaves your desk a little bit unique. Write a paragraph or add in some different points or change the focus of the content.

In this way not only do you add value to your own efforts, you will be adding value all round.

One way, I find the time for content writing is during long train journeys. I can get a few articles or blogs written and a few outlines for other bits and pieces. Now I just need to get a netbook to key them straight in rather than use the old pen and paper method which then takes me longer to get published.

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The fact that the global economy has reached a somewhat stagnant state of late shouldn’t mean that businesses’ growth initiatives should stutter to a standstill too.

The need to proactively seek out new opportunities is as important as ever – if not more so – as companies must react to the economic conditions and find fresh ways of targeting new customers.

One way of doing this is through extending your scope beyond the English-speaking markets and targeting the 75% of the world that speak no English at all. This may seem like a daunting prospect, but tapping into new or emerging markets isn’t as tricky as it first seems…all that’s needed in the first instance is a foreign language website and a little online marketing savvy.

Online marketing is probably one of the most effective tools available to modern day business. It connects company with customer and facilitates the building of mutually beneficial relationships between the retailers and consumers of the world.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is now among the fastest growing marketing strategies, with 64% of European marketers indicating that they planned to increase their SEO spend in 2009. However, optimising a company’s domestic English-language website is one thing – launching a fully-optimised foreign language website is quite another.

A myriad of cultural and linguistic intricacies face those seeking to grow abroad. In the European Union (EU) there are 23 official languages spoken in the 27 member states. Although English is the most widely spoken, German has the most native speakers in the EU with almost 20%, followed closely by English, Italian and French.

Understanding the nuances within languages is crucial to the translation/localisation process. For example, the differences between French and German are obvious. But the differences between French in France and French in Switzerland or Belgium aren’t that obvious.

In France, déjeuner means ‘lunch’, but in Switzerland and Belgium it means ‘breakfast’. Additionally, dîner is ‘evening meal’ in France, but in Swiss and Belgian French the word is souper.

There are many such differences between the French dialects in France, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium which help to highlight the importance of properly localising your services for each specific target market. The same can also be said for German (Germany)/Swiss German, Portuguese (Portugal)/Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish (Spain)/Latin American Spanish and, closer to home, US/UK English.

Assuming you intend to adopt a fully localised marketing strategy, what are the practicalities involved in setting up a foreign language website?

First of all, you must establish a need for your service in a particular country. A good way of doing this is to check out the local competition. If there are similar organisations there already, that’s a good sign, as it demonstrates a genuine demand. However, be wary of too much competition, as a saturated marketplace can be difficult to penetrate.

SEO is central to any domestic online marketing campaign, and international markets are no different. You may already rank highly on Google for certain key search terms on Google UK, such as ‘Home loans’ or ‘accounting services’. However, when you have your website translated for your target market, it’s important NOT to translate the keywords directly: the correct dictionary translation may not be what people use to search for their product or service locally…they might use abbreviations, colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing.

So in the same way as you identify your industry’s highest ranking keywords for the English market, such as via Google’s free keyword finder, you have to research the keywords for each target country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimised. Google has country-specific versions of its keyword tool and is an invaluable means of identifying the correct key search terms in your desired market.

These key phrases should then be incorporated into a professionally translated website to organically optimise its position in search engines.

Another point worth mentioning is that it’s actually possible to rise quicker in foreign search engine rankings, simply because the competition for key search terms is much less than on the English language internet.

And there you have it. A multilingual marketing and localisation strategy should underpin any attempt to enter new or emerging markets, with SEO playing a central role.

About Lingo24
Lingo24 is a global translation services provider that specialises in website localisation. It has over 100 employees based in the UK, Panama, Romania, China and New Zealand, and a network of 4,000 translators. Its projected turnover for 2009 is £3.7m.

Speedie Notes.

This was not a paid for article but one we felt worthy of inclusion.  As well as foreign language markets overseas, there are other smaller pockets of foreign language opportunities within the UK.  Do you need finance or insurance content translated into Polish or German, or Japanese?

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If you have read this blog in the last 6 months you would have read me use the term virtual real estate. As I said then I did not coin the word but like it some much, I try and use it whenever I find an excuse.

I have been thinking about a post like this for a while and think it is a good time to write it. I have been speaking with a few clients or late about how they can increase their exposure online without spending lots of money.

A few conversations later I have come up with a few ideas and places that you can add unique content to, which very little cost that will give you more access to your target audience.

The main response I got from clients was that they have never thought of using the Internet much beyond a corporate website and maybe at a push a blog.

Your virtual real estate really is the various locations that you can add content too in order to attract your audience that might not come direct to your website.

So here is a list of 14 sources of expanding your virtual real estate:

1. A standalone blog
2. An industry or secondary website – For example, if you sell classic car insurance, when not run a classic car information website
3. Using Social Networks – Your profile pages are potential routes for clients to find you
4. Article Syndication – writing and submitting content to a range of websites again provides a secondary route to your website
5. Newsletters – Running a promoting a news letter can add some viral elements of sharing which can attract new visitors
6. Guest Blogs – you can write a guest blog post for a related blog in your industry
7. Guest Articles – submit a unique article to another related website
8. Digital Magazine – create a PDF and setup a flash based newsletter
9. Video Site – If you are creating video why not create a separate site just for your video channel
10. Facebook Pages- Setup relevant Facebook fan pages
11. Web Applications – Create a tool that can be given away and circulated. This could be a web tool, Wordpress template or plugin as three examples
12. Audio Site- Create a Audio site for your podcasts and set it up like a radio channel
13. Answers – Using LinkedIn Answers and Yahoo Answers is a great way to get added expert content out there
14. Forums / Comments – Taking part in the on-line conversation on forum and commenting on blogs can lead to increased exposure, plus some of the sites rank well in Google so they can drive you some traffic.

As you can see there are lots of ways of increasing your virtual real estate with little more than a bit of time dedicated to expanding your online real estate every week.

All you need to do is make sure that ALL of the web content you add online adds some kind of value to the potential customer.

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Do you have pages on your website that you wish you could add links so that readers can easily share your content?  Now on blog platforms this is real easy to do, most come with some kind of module or plugin.  But what is you are running a old style html site?

Well here are few links that you can use to get set up on the main social networking sites.  You can find the graphic icons in most places, we tend to use some of these:

http://jwloh.deviantart.com/art/Aquaticus-Social-91014249
http://naldzgraphics.net/freebies/22-sets-of-the-best-social-bookmark-icons/

The actual html link code you need to get the icons to share the page is here:

Replace URL with the address of the page you want to have shared.

Delicious

http://del.icio.us/post?url=URL

Digg

http://digg.com/submit?url=URL

Reddit

http://reddit.com/submit?url=URL

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=URL

Stumbleupon

http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=URL

Here are a couple of Finance and Insurance specific bookmarking services

Tipd
These guys let you use several linking options here:

http://tipd.com/bloggers

PFBuzz
These guys let you use several linking options here:

http://pfbuzz.com/content/bookmarklet

Do you know of any Finance or Insurance specific bookmarking sites? Why not share them below?  Send us a comment.

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The latest research from Elance, the outsourcing website, which released its latest figures relating to what the top 10 work requests where for April 2009, shows that articles and content were the big gainers.

While dominated by programmers and coders (Numbers 1 and 2), there was a startling increase in the amount of content being requested.

“Article Writing” jumped up 2 places to Number 3

“Online Writing” jumped 12 places to Number 5

“Web Content” dropped 3 places to Number 10

You can see the full list here if you are interested:

http://www.elance.com/p/blog/2009/04/may_elance_online_work_index_cash_is_king.html

But that said it just goes to show that content and articles are growing in popularity as more and more companies turn to content to offset their reduced ad budgets and are starting to see the real long term benefits of a content strategy. They are also using it to boost their virtual real estate and increase the number of potential entry points for visitors online.

If you want to take advantage of this trend and outsource your insurance or finance website’s content strategy why not fill in our contact form and arrange a free 20 minute phone consultation with us and we can explain how we work and how we can help your business.

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