SpeedieConsulting

“Virtual Real Estate” was a term I first heard John Reese use and it really sums up a growing strategy for companies to have multiple websites focussed on separate product offerings and services.  In this way they are getting more chance of multiple listings. On top of this they are able to rank for very different search terms without compromising a parent website.

Using Wordpress allows us to not only deliver a CMS operated website we can:

• Prepoluate it with content
• Submit it to Social Media
• Submit some of it to Article Directories
• Run a stand alone site newsletter from it
• Create valid industry news services
• Build niche directory websites

Here is a quick presentation of what we can help you to create.  In a economic climate where costs are paramount of everyone’s mind, investing in more virtual real estate is a great way to invest in the future of your business.

Like what you see?  Why not give us a call or book in a free consultation with us.

Here is an idea for taking your support emails and turning them into content.  There are lots of  companies with huge (and I mean huge) amounts of potential unique content sat in their email which can be used to create a Support FAQ or knowledge base website that can be crawled by Google.  Using Wordpress and an import function you can build a FAQ website in a few hours. Here is a quick slideshare overview of the process that we operate for clients.

Do you see the benefits and want this for your business?  Talk to us now.

Working with lots of online insurance companies, we are always amazed at the lack of content on their websites, yet insurance companies sell some of the most complicated financial products online, so why are they not educating the customer as best as they can so that they can make an informed decision. This can only be done by adding content.

Maybe it is because they don’t have idea for what to write about. Here are 10 ideas for insurance content for insurance broker websites and these are in no order of importance…

1. Frequently Asked Questions – By now you should have a huge range of questions and answer that you would have provided to customers over the years, either via email, by letter, or over the phone. Collect the more common ones and publish a webpage with this content on. If you have enough you can add a FAQ page per product.

2. Product Information – Don’t just hope that the customer will understand your product because he has found your website. They are looking for information – Give it to them. Glossaries and product guide are great content and these can be split over several pages

3. Editorial Section – Do you add your own voice to your website? Add an editorial section or article section.

4. Question and Answer Sessions – Why not run a Q&A session either with a product specialist in your industry, a related industry that would be useful to your clients – Why not run a Q&A with a local accountant or a mortgage broker. You can use this as a basis for a webpage or if you record it, audio or video, you can publish this on your site and promote it. Or do both and get twice or thrice the content for one bit of effort.

5. Product provider information – Who do you work with, what are they about and why do you work with them. Build a page per partner.

6. Detailed Biography of you and your staff – Add a page for each staff member, get personal. Remember people like people so adding a page per staff member will give a prospective client a good feel about what you are all about.

7. Blog – Could you add a blog to your site? And have more tips and comments on the issues on the industry or on topics that relate to your clients.

8. Video – We touched on this before but some products or application processes could be better explained by hosting a video. This can be done with simple screen capture software. You could offer a whole range of helpful videos which you can add to your website.

9. Forum – The daddy of user generated content. Add a managed forum on your website which you patrol and engage with your customer and clients.

10. News Section – You can add a section on your company news, new staff, new partnerships, or about your work in the local community. In addition add in some industry news from other trusted news sources or rewrite news stories with your own comments or slant.

As you can see there are some very simple steps here to add a raft of great content to any insurance website.

Adding unique content to any website is one of the most important components you can have to attract new business, visitors and search engines to your website. With Financial and Insurance websites, providing access to the most up to date news and finance content will be a great way to attract new clients and business to your website.

Stuck For Finance Content Ideas For Your Website?

Here a small selection of content ideas you could add to your website to beef it up. The more unique content you have, the more likely it is that the major search engines will come and visit. Think of it this way, the more unique pages you have, the more salesmen you have out there attracting new clients and new opportunities to your business.

1. Article Archive
2. Press Release Articles
3. Tip Sheets and Downloadable Guides
4. Product Pages
5. Latest News both about your Company and about your Industry
6. Examples and Testimonials – Written, Video or Audio
7. Product legislation Information by product
8. A Blog – Client, Company or Industry Focused

With all content make sure you write fore the customer first and search engine second. While search engines are important to get you noticed, there is really no point driving people to these pages only for them to switch off and go elsewhere.

Other finance content idea include Interactive content, while search engines may not be able to index and rank it, if it is a useful addition for a user then you really must consider adding it.

1. Calculators
2. Quotation Systems
3. Video and Audio files
4. Searchable databases of contacts or useful information

As you can see there are a huge range of ideas for content. The main drivers must be to create unique sought after content that is engaging and gets other people talking about it and linking to it.

If there is one thing that we are being told to do with our websites is to add new content. While this is easy said, how can you add quality useful content on a regular basis. Most small businesses are one or two people companies who are trying to do everything all at the same time. Adding a web page every day to their website is real hard work and sadly is not seen as a business priority.

If you are stuck in this rut and haven’t updated your website for a while, it might be time to add some user generated content facilities.

User generated content simply put, is allowing your site visitors to add their content to your site. It may be some feedback on a product or review. It could be a posting on your website forum. How about letting visitors post articles to your site or allowing them to add themselves to your business directory.

Can you see how this can boost the interactivity of your website and show that it is constantly being updated? Search Engines, in particular, like a constantly updated website. The more you update, the more often they will send their search engine spiders and crawlers to visit your site.

Don’t get me wrong though, there is still a bit of work to do, you will have to manage and approve what content is to be put live but an hour approving 20 or 30 pages of new unique content must be a good thing. Can you think how long it will take to create that amount of content? 20 – 30 hours if you write as slowly as me!

Okay , so what can I do to add some User Generated Content to my Site?

Here are a few ideas for content generation. Where possible I have also added links to get some free scripts that you can use.

Article Content

You could allow users to submit articles to your site. You could then use these on your website or newsletter. You could use a tool such as www.ArticleDashboard.com, a Free PHP script which can build a Article Directory complete with author management tools.

Having a large selection of articles rated to your specific niche can only be a good thing and provide your visitors with some great content and a fresh perspective. You can advertise for Authors or ask others in your industry.

Experts would be able to sign themselves up with an account and start submitting articles. You would adjust need to spend a few minutes approving or declining before publishing.

Forums

One thing that gets a site interactive quicker than anything else is the addition of a Forum or Bulletin Board.

Giving Visitors a platform to discuss your product, services and marketplace in general is a great way to build traffic. Some sites even use a facility to build and send out newsletters to their registered users based upon their Forums. Try www.phpbb.com which is a very high powered piece of software which is FREE to use.

Guestbooks

While not as popular anymore, there is nothing stopping you using a Guestbook to drive more content to your site. Ask people to stop by and leave a comment. Make sure you police it though!

You may find you web hosting can complete with a GuestBook Script. Normally these are CGI or PHP scripts.

Visit Focal Media for Guest Friend, a CGI Script. You can use GuestBooks in many different ways, just because it is a Guest Book Script doesn’t mean you have to use it as such. You could use it to post site updates or product info snippets. You could use it to build up Testimonials

Comment Scripts

With the advent of Blogs came the ability to leave a comment on your posts which helped build the content on your site. Now, there are scripts around that you can add to your site pages, such as article or product review pages, and allow visitors to leave comments.

This then means that your pages are changing constantly and a changing page is as good as a new page for the search engine spiders. I have not found a good free script but there is a good low cost script. Visit www.InstantSiteComments.com. Robert Blackstone’s script is easy to install and very powerful.

Build a Directory

Why not build a useful directory of associated or complimentary businesses. Let companies add their own details. Some scripts allow descriptions of up to 1000 words and these can be split into seperate pages. Try www.ocportal.com, www.phplinkdirectory.com or www.cplinks.com for a FREE version to get you started.

Keep the directory tight to your product area. Don’t try and mimic Yahoo! or DMOZ. Build a quality Niche Directory. Less truly is more! Invite sites you want to appear in the directory to submit their details. Don;t do it form them. Let them write their own content.

Blogs

We touched on the ability of blogs earlier. Adding blog to your site allows you to add content from anywhere in the world as long as you have web access. The other benefit is that you can allow anyone to post to your blog. This builds content and changes pages constantly. Try www.blogger.com, www.typepad.com or www.wordpress.org for free Blogging Software.

News Feeds and RSS

What better way to add new content your site than adding a newsfeed to your site. This could be a third party feed which headlines appearing on your site and when they update the news, then your feed will change. You could however, write your own news feed or hire a writer to summarise important news stories in your speciality on a daily basis.

You could then run your own RSS (News) feed which other sites can use on their sites. This gains you more exposure for your site. A true win win! You can get a low cost news script service which allows you to create a RSS feed AND has a online content management tool visit www.newsscript.co.uk or you could use the RSS functions of a Blogging tool such as Wordpress.

In summary

While this is not an exclusive list, I think there is more than enough ways here to add one or two elements to increase the perceived activity on your website. Think creatively and I’m sure you can put a spin on a few of these things for your needs. The only investment to get these services up and running is a little time or if you need technical assistance a little money….

Trust me it is a worthwhile investment…

Want to add some news content to your site to keep it fresh and up to date but not sure where to start? Thinking of things to write about consistently can take us just as long as the writing itself.

How can you automate part of the researching and thinking elements of the process? Here are a couple of ideas that we use to help us with ideas:

Use your Social Networks
Ask questions on LinkedIn, Yahoo Answers or on IFALife in the forum section to evoke some feedback. Ask questions around your niche or topic of interest. In this way, you can then incorporate other opinions and you may get ideas back that you never thought about

NewsNow
NewsNow is a news service aggregator which allows you to search hundreds of worldwide news feeds in one place! They have a great archive of news too, so why not carry out some keyword searches to find out what is happening in your industry or dig through the archives to find some little gems you could use as the basis of an article or story. Stories tend to be very seasonal so look at stuff from the same time last year and you could get some useful ideas to pan for the rest of the year.

Blogs
Look at other people’s blogs either by visiting or using their RSS feeds to find out what is going on in your industry.

Google Alerts.
Signup with Google alerts and have then send you a daily email relating to news and blog post around your major keywords. You won’t get every bit of news under the sun but it will give you some ideas, I’m sure. You can do the same with yahoo too but I have not found them to be especially different so stick with one or the other, after all you don’t need to bombard yourself with email.

RSS Feeds
Visit blogs or sites in your target niche, even competitors and signup to as many of the RSS Feeds as you can. Choose an RSS aggregator such as Google Reader or Bloglines so you can search through the various feeds if you have an idea and see what others are saying.

Twitter
Yes Twitter, I have found twitter to be an excellent source of links and resources that others in my niche are sharing. If you use FireFox , install TwitterFox and tweets appear on your desktop as they happen. Signup to “follow” anyone in your industry. Use www.twellow.com to search out people and follow them, then take it one stage further and look to see who they are following and follow some of them too! You will be amazed at the stuff some people share.

Well there are three simple ideas you can implement in the next 10 minutes to start automatically researching your niche and having technology give you ideas for your content writing

When it comes to your content, they are all one hit wonders! Having a website and simply adding content when you first build it, is like having one chance at reaching the top of the charts. Now unless you have the best unique, most talked about content in the world, it will be difficult. And once you have reached the highs, staying there is something else.

Just ask any of the acts above!

But it doesn’t have to be this way for your website. By building in a content marketing strategy and adding new content on a regular basis, you will keep your site fresh and up to date, and it will become a place where search engines and visitors alike will keep coming back to.

So what kind of content can you add?

Most sites add 4 or 5 pages about their products and maybe an about us page or a company news page. This is clearly not enough, you need to be adding industry news, product news, articles, guides, FAQs, a glossary, maybe even add a blog with your opinion on your marketplace.

Whatever you decide to add, you need to make it consistent. If you want to add news stories, then create a schedule of 1 or 2 per day. Make it realistic and achievable, there is no point adding 10 pieces of content on one day, then add nothing for 6 weeks because you are burnt out. Pace yourself!

But what if you don’t have the time? You could hire a writer or copywriter who understands your industry or products, or get a member of staff to do it. While content marketing is not a one hit wonder, it is a good steady, proven strategy for long term growth.

Unlike, Pay Per Click marketing, where once you pay the money you only get one lot of traffic, with content marketing it is similar to adding a new virtual member to your sales team who can be out promoting your products for as long as he/she is online. Therefore the return on investment for adding content can be seen as infinite.

It also has a calming effect on your traffic levels, you tend to maintain a level and then build on it, and there are not massive peaks and troughs when you add content consistently.

Why not revisit your website and look for ways of adding more content or contact us and we can give you a few more ideas relevant to your website.

Micro sites or mini sites are a good way to take a profitable offshoot of your main business and build a totally focused site of around 5 – 10 pages.

What are the benefits of this? Well micro sites allow you to branch out and create something totally focussed on a single topic. For example , an IFA website could include Pensions, Investments and Insurance products. On one site it will be difficult to rank highly for all three easily.

Yet a single site on Life Insurance could help attract more traffic and rankings. It also gives you two bites of the cherry when it comes to web rankings. We have clients that have multiple page one rankings both for their main website and their microsite.

And with the popularity of Content management systems such as Wordpress, it is easy to create a second or even multiple mini sites for your business. Simply register more domain names and add a second web host, and away you go.

Instead of cutting marketing spend, lots of companies are reducing their Pay Per Click budgets and investing in Virtual Real Estate (VRE) by building a range of targeted themed mini sites. In this way they are investing their marketing spend in the future not just the right now.

Why not enquire of your webs designers or web marketing company what it would cost to build a series of mini sites?

It could be just the thing to separate your from your competition. Need ideas for mini sites. They could be product specific (a critical illness website), geographic (Kent IFA website) or even profession based (Pensions for Teachers).

Hopefully this will give you a kick-start for thinking about what you can do. And once it is build, start incorporating some of the marketing techniques you will be using for your main website. You can find a ton of them here: Wake up Your Website

Having microsites is a great way to build up your companies VRE and drive more traffic. The cost upfront is offset by the fact that once build and marketed, you have something driving you traffic for as long as you like.

Good luck!

Content writing is still one of the major part of what we do and I am always surprised when new clients first get involved with us that we see a distinct lack of new content being added to their websites. Some of it hasn’t changed in years!

It is almost as if the activity stops when the site gets uploaded for the first time.  Now some of this is due to the age old “our web designers have gone and we can’t update the website ourselves” chestnut.  Other reasons include the fact that no one was told that fresh constantly updating content would be needed so no content management systems were needed.  Hey it keeps the costs down. But when you look at the responsibility of a corporate website, whose job is it to look at the content.

It normally falls to the SEO company that  goes in when the website owners start to realise that they are not getting any traffic or exposure.  The SEO company then says the immortal words , “well you need more site content”.  They then go on to say that they need a CMS to be able to manage and add content.

Oh if we had only known this before!  Well now you do.

Adding Content to a site is like adding another sales man to the sales team.  The more unique content you have on your site, the more chances or opportunities you have to get that page listed in the search engines.  Once done, you can then move on to the next piece of content, happy that the content you added yesterday will work for you as long as it is online.

Compared to PPC, Content marketing is a pay once, potentially drive traffic forever solution.  In fact, we are seeing this influx of new customers as they look to  build more lasting sources of traffic that offer a better ROI in the long term.  PPC is a great testing platform, or good in the finance and insurance space if you have deep pockets but for the average broker it can get quite expensive.

If you are finding it tough going at the moment with your ad spend, maybe divert some of it to adding more content to your site or even build a few targeted mini sites.  These are easy to do and using a platform such as Wordpress or Joomla, you can have a great functioning content management system with all the bells and whistles you need.  What’s more they are free open source solutions- so cost won’t be a factor!

When you start a new business or look for ways to drive more business, many people turn to the Internet. With the promise of free sites, free blogs and free email addresses, most first time web marketers get pulled into the world of Blogger, Yahoo, or Google Mail.

Now these are okay for yourself to communicate with family or friends or to run a hobby site, but the minute you decide to run a business, the first thing you need to do is stop thinking about free.

Free web address and email addresses in a business context smells of cheap and will not do your credibility any good whatsoever. Also bear in mind that some of these sites will give you a really long and unwieldy domain name which will be difficult to promote and difficult for clients to remember. This will not be a good start.

Most of these free email services are frowned upon as they have been abused in the past by lots of people so your email might not get through. Some of the free site services have also pulled sites down without any warning. Blogger has done this in the past if they feel you are in breach of their terms and conditions.

If you want to make a good impression online, buy a domain name. They can be bought for a few pounds each year and can come with email addresses too.

In some industries or business opportunities, you are even given a fully functioning free website but you will have no control over it. You don’t and won’t even own the domain name. So what happens if you fall out with the company or the company goes bust? How does that leave you, you have spent all this time building someone else’s website only for you to lose out.

My advice?

What you could do initially, is to buy your own domain name, and have it redirected to your free site. In this way, you are marketing and promoting YOUR web address and if you decided to move companies or change services then you can easily point your domain name elsewhere and you will not have lost any of the marketing you have carried out.

I would only suggest these for those of you who are given a great looking and functioning site, some franchises will give you a website for example, or some networks or professional bodies will.

The other major downside to these free sites is that apart from your contact details, all the other pages and information of the site are the same as any other company that uses the same network as you. This could kill your website before it has even started. Google, for example, does not like seeing duplicated sites across its rankings and therefore will not rank duplicated sites. Therefore your site might not be listed simply because it was given to you by a network with hundreds of other clients.
I suppose the only saving grace, is that none of those will be ranking either.

Search engines can be a major live blood to any new business, so making sure you do the right thing by them is paramount.

I would strongly advise anyone that has one of these sites to make sure they also have their own, owned domain name and have some originally written content for it. There are low cost web packages available that will give you a fighting chance of getting your sites ranked in Google and the other major search engines.

Having said all that, there is a place for these free services. There is nothing stopping you building a free site or free blog that promotes your main website. In fact, I would actively encourage it!

Free services such as

www.geocities.com
www.hubpages.com
www.squidoo.com
www.blogger.com
www.typepad.com
www.freewebs.com
www.bravenet.com

are all good services to quickly build sites that you can link to your main website but do not use them or any other free service to build your main business website.

In summary, if you are looking at building your first company website, avoid freebies. Spend a bit of money to buy a business domain name and get yourself a website. It may seem an unnecessary expense when people are offering freebies, but if you want a website that drives you business, you will need to invest in it.