M & A Rainmaker

I get loads of comments on my M & A Rainmaker blog. ( ok lots of them are just link spammers – I know ). I read them all and I value them all ( well except the link spammers that write horrible, incomprehensible, inane things and then expect me to approve them ! ).

It has gone way beyond being a place where I wanted to write down my experiences of starting, building and selling companies. In the main it has become a place where my journey through Internet Marketing has been documented. This was a journey that started in the early 2000’s. It was a journey that was driven by a desire to understand how to get found on the Internet. My firm belief was that people would search for information about nearly everything on the Internet – and then, sometimes, they would actually buy. In other words whatever you sold you needed to have a presence on the Internet and you needed to be found for the services and products that you supplied.

Now there are many blogs posts on this website that are meant to be found for certain ( Google ) searches. For example if you search on
” Internet Marketing Strategy Lichfield ” you will find that a couple of blog posts from here rank at at the top and that further down there is a Pinterest link, a Digg link and then a Twylah link. Yes, some social networks will give you search results aswell !!

But I digress, this post was supposed to be about my blog needing a really good sort out.

Actually I think it is a mother beautiful blog. It was designed for me by Nikki Pilkington and I love the colour and the ” clean lines “. It is uncluttered by, well anything really.

What does it need though ??

Well there are a few things that I plan to add sometime:

1. I need links to all my Social Network pages. ( At the moment these are just on the ” Contact Page ” ).

2. I need you to be able to share all my blogs easily on your Social Network pages.

3. I need to put ” Call to Actions ” on my blog posts e.g. at the bottom of this one.

4. I need an email sign-up section ( but this assumes that I am then going to start emailing my email database ).

5. I am thinking about adding ” Skimlinks ” and have actually signed up for it and been approved.

I could put adverts on my blogsite – not sure if I will but I could.

6. I should have some sort of comment spam filter – at the moment I just approve or not comments.

Actually that’s about all I am thinking about.

( Maybe – mobile friendly ?? )

Yeah , I know I should have some pictures here aswell !!

If you have any thoughts then please let me know 🙂

When someone said that to me the other day I thought well, everyone can’t can they !! As I responded – I can do it because I am a
” published writer ” !!  I have not written a book and had it published but I have written a number of articles, stories and blogs – some of which have been published.

I feel like I have a book or two in me but there’s a bit of distance between now and something I can open and thumb through.

I definately don’t consider myself to be a professional writer. However, I have developed a rather unusual ability to write Search Engine Optimised or Content Optimised blogs and articles.

This blog has not been written to rank ( in Google ) for anything. I consider this to be a relaxing piece of writing because I do not have any key words or phrases in my head that I am trying to work into my titles and content.

No, this is completely unoptimised content. I am just writing something.

I was listening to Twylah co-founder Eric Kim recently and he was talking about how Twitter is great for people who can’t string a blog together. All they have to do is to is to think up something that takes up to 140 characters. Anyone can do that right ??

Well, I think that most people could think of something to say but the question is would it be worth reading ?? Leaving aside celebrities there are obviously quite a few people who can write something interesting in 140 characters – judging by the number of followers that they have.

On the other hand when you look at some of the things that people say you wonder why they are doing it and who is reading it. I have to say that I have got a little bored with people that just throw out ” famous quote ” after ” famous quote “. Although it is surprising how many I quite like – and like enough to ReTweet. I do wonder just how many interesting ” quotes ” there are and how many people will  continue to be interested in reading them.

I don’t have much time for ” Life Coach ” type quotes either but again some of them you read and are glad to be reminded of.

I actually write blogs for some people. Most of the time I do this myself but I always ask them to think of topics and if possible, angles themselves. I then create blogs around their ideas that are typically laced with words and phrases that they want to rank for.

You have basically got to have a blog these days. I could explain why but trust me you need one. In simple terms you need to be adding fresh, relevant content to your web/blogsite and domain.

Your blog is part of what I call your ” Internet Marketing Ecosystem “. ( Search on that term here or in Google for more information ).

I have 2 or 3 things at the core of my ” Internet Marketing Ecosystem ” – a web/blogsite and a Twylah page.

Here is my Twylah page – http://www.twylah.com/cwindley .

A Twylah page takes your 140 character Tweets ( usually with links to pictures and videos ) and automatically ( with no effort from yourself ) puts them into a web/blogsite.

So this https://twitter.com/#!/cwindley is reorientated as this http://www.twylah.com/cwindley.

Not only are my Tweets re-presented but they are also sorted into categories. In my case:

Marketing

Social Media

Business

Twitter

and

Startups

are the uppermost categories. ( I can decide which categories I want to appear first ).

The Twylah pages are searchable ( they are like normal web/blog pages ) and thousands of peoples Tweets are pouring into the Twylah website producing rich ( text, pictures and videos ) content for Google to find.

What I am saying is that your Twylah pages are going to rank high in Google for the categories that represent you.

Arguably your Twylah page is a more accurate reflection of your Internet presence than, say, Klout, Kred or PeerIndex.

The main point is this – you don’t have to be able to write blogs – just get a Twylah page and it will write them ( automatically SEO’d ) for you !!

but glad to hear that you made a physical and digital Will.

This blog was pointed out to me the other day by Thomas Power

http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=157243

It’s interesting to think that Thomas was having his ” Digital Will ” thoughts when I was starting to work with

http://www.mydigitalexecutor.co.uk/

It would seem that we have both had death on our minds.

I also came across this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT2O1zSfXVM

from Adele McAlear of http://www.deathanddigitallegacy.com/ which really covers a lot of the issues involved in Digital Death and talks about blogger Mac Tonnies death ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Tonnies ).

One of my friends – Gary ” Photography ” Morgan also died last year and there were quite a few issues over some of his digital legacy ( http://www.footprints.me.uk/index.php , https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=154988787849739 ).

I think Thomas is correct in highlighting that one of the main pieces of digital value that most ” Online ” people have is their email database. If you consider the successful internet marketers the cornerstone of their Internet Marketing efforts is their email database.

You will often find them emailing on behalf of a friend or business colleague.

If you are a Director or shareholder in an online business then probably this online business will become part of your ” Physical will ” but if you have, say, an eBay shop that you regularly sell things from and an associated PayPal account then these may need to be part of your ” Digital Will “.

As Thomas and Adele point out one of the keys to everything else is your primary email address and the password for this. It is is the key to your digital legacy.

Most people don’t get around to making a physical will, never mind a digital will so we are making it easy for people to get started.

It’s free and all you need to provide is your name, email and short address.

http://www.mydigitalexecutor.co.uk/join-us/

If I Google myself it’s mainly the social network entries that come to the top – LinkedIn, Facebook etc etc

Someone sent me this link today

http://viralso.com/linkedin.html

to people who reckon that they can SEO your LinkedIn profile page so that you come to the top of Google. ( Of course we all know that there are no guarantees on this front !! ).

I just thought that it was interesting and a sign of the times !!

Yes, well it may APPEAR as though nothing has happened but actually – in the background it has.

I have been talking to Howard at Seventh Wave Media ( http://www.seventhwavemedia.co.uk/home ) and Nikki at Nikki Pilkington.com ( http://www.nikkipilkington.com/ ) about what we are doing and I have one more ” adviser ” that I want to involve in the experiment.

Obviously the companies that we are working with have loads of other things to do other than this.

The main tasks that we have set have been for them to produce initial lists of what they want to be found on the Internet for. We have also given them an appreciation of the fact that when we try and get them found for these things ( and any others that we come up with after discussion ) some of them will be harder to do than others. So we are looking for some flexibility and lateral thinking. We also asked then to think about thier main products and services and then prioritise the keywords/phrases in line with what is most important to them.

Nikki made a great point which was that we not only need to look at what they want to be found for but also what it is worth putting the effort into being found for  ( effort/reward ratio ?? ). This made me think about a Cisco chart I once saw where they plotted all the things that they wanted to do from an Internet presence perspective on a graph of ” How difficult to do and how costly ” to ” What benefit would be derived from it ” and then picked off all the easy to do and derived great benefit points first and then left the harder more expensive and lower return ones until last.

This went well with the fact that we gave advice on the fact that some things are much harder to rank for than others and we have various ways of finding out how easy it will be to rank for different things.  If we can find relevant, less competitive keywords it will be much easier to be found and rank for these than it will be  for competitive ones.

Anyway we have initial lists back from both companies now and we are looking at these. I did have a bit of a test yesterday using Ecademy posts to see if I could get a ranking for a couple of the terms and I did get a number one listing for one of the terms within an hour and a middle of page one ranking for another within 12 hours. So, both of these terms look doable.

We have also asked the companies to get Google Webmaster Tools ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Webmaster_Tools ) and Google Analytics (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics )    installed on thier websites so that we can look at the effect that all of our effort has on traffic to thier website.

Remember, at the end of the day we are interested in how much business they get out of all this but first we will look to improve visibility, findability and then visitors to them and thier websites. We will be looking for all forms of inbound enquiries – emails, posts, phone calls etc etc

We also had a discussion about email-shots with one of the companies and I have put up a few comments about this both here on this blog and elsewhere. It was quite interesting looking at various email-shot companies and looking at what other people were doing with thier own email-shots. This led to an emphasis on the fact that email-shots are connected into the New Media Marketing Whirlpool in a number of ways eg the email-shot will refer people back to the website, offer links to eg Twitter,Facebook etc pages and needs a url with a relevant decsription so that the email can be posted on various Social Network and Information sites.

ok – so a big decision was made today by some friends and I but I have some more people to talk to that I would like to participate in this with us.

We have decided to work with a couple of companies to help them develop thier Internet & Social Media Marketing presence.We will tell you more about them as and when we and they are ready.

Ultimately our objective is going to be to increase thier sales. Initially we will focus on raising thier profile on Google for selected search terms and increasing the number of visitors and traffic to thier main website. ( We will do this in many and various ways ). Then we will be looking for actual conversations, enquiries and leads and then how many of those leads we can convert into sales.

Here is an interesting presentation about social media return on investment that will be relevant: 

http://www.slideshare.net/thebrandbuilder/olivier-blanchard-basics-of-social-media-roi

I have had a number of conversations with the parties that we are working with at the moment and the same view was coming out from them.

” Chris, all of this is very interesting but WHERE DO WE START ?? ”

Now THAT is a very good question !!!!

Indeed where DO you start ??? Well of course where you start depends on where you are….

We have decided that the Day Zero tasks for them are as follows:

First, they must decide what terms they want to be found for. What would a customer put into Google’s search box that would result in them being found ??? We have caveated this with an understanding that some search terms are much harder to rank for than others. For example if someone is searching for ” computer systems ” Google says ( on my search this time ) that there were 141 Million results. However, if someone searches for ” computer systems in Dorset ” there were ( this time ) 162 Thousand results. Therefore this is one way of saying that the first search term is much more “competitive” than the second. i.e. it is likely to be much harder to rank high on Google for the first term than the second. This leads to the idea of being flexible ( lateral thinking ) in terms of what you want to be found for and also to being ” niche ” and ” specific “. How about ” HP computer systems in Dorset ” ? – 17,100 results i.e. more niche and specific and probably easier to rank high for.

( There are considerable numbers of other ways of finding other, related search terms or keywords including the fact that as you start to type
” HP computer….. ” Google gives you suggestions as to what you might be looking for  e.g. ” HP computers for sale ” it suggests. You can also use sophisticated keyword analysis tools like Wordtracker –  http://www.wordtracker.com/ ).

We have also suggested that our companies consider all the potential products and services that they offer as possible search terms eg
”  asterisk based telephone systems “.

The companies that we are talking to have websites and we have looked at these.

We have asked that the companies ensure that Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools are installed on thier websites and if they are not installed the we will install them.

This is going to give us historical ( hopefully ) and baseline information that will guide us on things like correct structure of the website, keywords being used, inbound links, number of hits, traffic etc etc etc

We will be using our keyword analysis to guide us going forward on things like content and appropriate metatags and titles.

We have already looked at the websites source code and so we know that there are things that need addressing. We have also looked briefly at competitor sites and where they appear in the searches and how they are constructed. We think that even for some of the very competitive terms we have a chance of getting a good ranking.

We will also do our own list of keywords and phrases to compare with the lists  and  ( probably ) add to  what they have.

So, that’s Day Zero !!!

It was chatting to people today because the whole subject area kept coming up. I liked a couple of the comments that were made today:

A friend ” My daughter is the Twitter and Facebook expert for ( a very big computer company ). I don’t have a clue what she does “.

One of the companies ” xyz says we should have a YouTube channel. What ??? ”

It’s a very fast changing area that we are in and as I also discussed with someone today the one thing to realise is that it is never totally finished. There is always something else to do to ensure that you are found before someone else. It’s sort of scary but also sort of comforting as is the fact that you are not the only one to have a website that you don’t totally like and certainly has not been optimised. There are loads of people in the same boat !!

It would perhaps take me too long to explain the whole story of how this book came about but it is a beautiful little book with some wise words in it written in a fun way. Perhaps one day I will tell the whole story !!

It’s author, Jet Rotmans, is an artist who, to me, has become an Internet artist. She may be one of the first artist’s to have embraced social networking and blogging and to have weaved art into the ether.

You can get a copy of the book here

http://www.floppyfaithfactory.com/

and you can find out more about Jet by Googling her and connecting with her.

I just thought that I would have a quick look to see how The Glan was doing for people that searched for Christmas and New Year in Holywell.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=christmas+in+holywell&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

I am pleased to say that thanks to NikkiP and her team we have good representation in this and related searches with the Glan blog featuring well

Christmas meal in Holywell – Eat Christmas dinner at The Glan!

and also an old Ecademy blog that I did making a reappearance in 2009/10 clothing

http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=list&lid=73858

Nice to see !!