WizontheWeb» Online marketing

Online Marketing in Maidenhead

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:44:26 +0000

Offering web design services in Maidenhead, I am naturally interested in any local business directories especially if they are free! These directories offer opportunities for online marketing in Maidenhead which often come up on the first page of google. Of course it would be better to spend some time and money on your own site to grab those local searches but these are the next best thing.

www.maidenhead-berkshire.co.uk

Why should a small business blog?

admin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:53:18 +0000

If you know what a blog is and how to use it then don’t read any further but people I talk to still ask me quite often what a business blog is and why have one. Although it is extra work on top of the normal workload of running a business there is no better way than informing your customers and potential customers what is happening in your company.

A business blog is known to be one of the best ways to generate traffic to your site. But having a business blog is not just about getting driving visitors to your site but about informing the ones that do arrive and helping the visitor to get to know you and see that you know what you are talking about. Being able to generate information on your website easily will also help if you are entering into a marketing campaign as you can create a ‘specific’ landing page for your direct mailing or email newsletter campaign.

What is a blog?

For a detailed account of what a blog is then go over to the wiki describing it. But this might be overwhelming. In it’s simplest form, a business blog is an area of your website where you can write ‘articles’. Each ‘article’ is placed under a category. The list of category you decide on. So for example a simple set of categories you may create would be :

Case Studies
In the newspaper
Testimonials/Happy Customers
New Services
Tips
Events Diary
Special Offers

The list is endless but it is often quite effective to have just a 4-5 categories.

Now when we talk about ‘articles’, it doens’t have to a full blown essay. For example, an entry in the ‘events Diary’ may well only be a few lines long.

How to have a blog on my website

There are a number of ways of having a business blog. The ones I get involved in are:

1. As a bolt on to exiting websites. So that the blog would have an address like www.yoursite.co.uk/blog. The ‘blog’ is designed so that it looks and feels like your existing site with links and menus back to the main site. This is quite an inexpensive option.

2. Your website is converted so that the whole website is now running using the blogging system. In the long run this is a better option if you have a website which is currently difficult to update as you can then add/delete pages, add images and all sorts of wonderful features on your main site.

Small Business Website Statistics

admin — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:40:33 +0000

Do small businesses need to know website statistics?

How many visitors did we have this week? Which pages did they look at? How long did they stay on it? Which country are they from? Which city are they from? Which website did they come from or did they find come to us from a search engine? If they came to us from a search engine then which words did they search on?

All these questions are of interest to even the smallest businesses. For example say if you only have a brochure style website. You don’t want to be bothered updating it you just want it there. Then you decide to do some direct marketing, maybe leaflet drops or sending out some direct mail. Is there any way of measuring the success rate of this marketing activity other than someone picking up the phone?

Yes, by looking at your website statistics you can view visitor information for individual weeks, days, months or any range of date. Although it is not an exact science (you need to use the email newletter system for that) you can get some idea of how successful your marketing was because most people these days view your website before thinking about calling you.

Please don’t ignore getting stuck into this side of your business. Even if you don’t want to look at the system itself we can create specific weekly or daily reports to your requirements and configure them so that they are sent to your email.

Google Local Business Directory

admin — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:04:10 +0000

The most common question any web developer/designer is asked is ‘will my website come up in Google’, after of course they’ve asked how much will it cost. I am not going to talk about that here but the most basic thing any small business should do whether they are a hairdresser or marketing consultant is to add themselves to the ‘Google Local Business Directory’. It is ABSOLUTELY free and it is not rocket science.

What is the Google Local Directory

If you go to google and type in for example ‘Maidenhead Hairdressers’ you will see the following list. The one I’ve circled at the top is the Google Local Business directory.

Local Business Directory Example - Maidenhead Hairdressers

How to get listed

You need to go along to https://www.google.com/local/add/ . You will need to sign-up for a google account and they will also walk you through being verified.

They will ask you to enter all the usually details about your business. You can also add photos and videos which if you can then do it. The more information you can put up the better , it definitely won’t do you any harm. I haven’t added a video yet but why not? You could then also add it to Youtube. I’m no marketing expert but even for a small business people often buy because they like the person they are buying from. This is especially important if you are a service based business.

Unfortunately there is no way of knowing whether you’ll be at the top of the directory, that is up to google to decide.