I already had a top 5 position in a Google search for the highest ranking Digital Marketing Expert but that was with Pinterest which was sort of cheating

A few days ago I decided that it was time for a Plan B and maybe even a Plan C and time to put the Digital Marketing Ecosystem to work again

Some people might have thought that my Pinterest listing at the top of Google was a lucky demonstration of my Internet Marketing skills. I obviously didn’t make a Pinterest page with that title for no reason. However, when I was working on other Pinterest pages recently I noticed a few strange things happening and it got me to thinking that I needed a back-up plan for my ranking for this term so I determined to write a blog on the Centripetal Network Consulting website that would also rank   .

I am also writing this blog as a sort of Plan C !! 🙂

If you read this blog please take at least one thing away with you – to rank today you need a strategy that combines Social Media with a great website. Trust me – you do.

Getting a website or a blog to rank high for a specific term is an art form. Seeing that website or blog there is literally the tip of the iceberg. The part that you see of an iceberg is about 1 Tenth of the overall mass of that berg. Most of it is below the surface.

Most of the reason why my blogs rank so high is ” below the surface ” – you can’t see it even if you know how to analyse websites and blogs. Let me explain something to you. My blogs and websites are not even specifically targeted at Digital Marketing !!!! Obviously Centripetal Network Consulting is a global digital strategy, sales and marketing company. However, in a similar way to us ranking for ” Wealth Management London ” searches if I really wanted to  rank for Wealth Management terms I would build a blog or website focused on Wealth Management. Everything on it would be about Wealth Management. It would be THE authority on Wealth Management.

This site is about M & A ( Mergers and Acquisitions ) but the likelihood is that this blog is going to rank high.

Why ???? QUALITY !!!

From it’s foundations up the Centripetal Network Consulting website is a QUALITY website. It’s content is produced by humans ( mostly me ) and it is relevant to the topic in question if not focussed on it.

There’s something else that very few people talk about because they don’t understand it. If you think about it a web or blogsite is software running on a server ( like a PC or Laptop but built to ” serve ” software ).

Where is this server ?? Well it is usually in some sort of data centre somewhere in the world – could be the U.K. – might be  the U.S. , Europe or India.

Is it a shared server or a dedicated ( to you ) server. ( It is likely to be shared unless you have specifically sought a dedicated server ).

You might be wondering what the relevance of this is ?? You know how your PC and Laptop runs slowly when it has lots of software applications open on it ?? Well if you are sharing with other people with resource hungry web/blog sites your web/blog site is going to run slowly too.

That’s not all – your website can run slowly if it is not configured properly and has too many ” plug-ins ” .

The geographical location of your server and it’s connectivity also affects your website performance.

All of this affects the  ” performance ” of your web and blogsite and is one of Google’s ranking factors.

The positive effect of good website performance is the reason that companies like WP Engine  have started up. On their first page they have this testimonial for example :

“My site loads ridiculously fast, my page views are up, and my business
is seeing the results. I rest easy at night with the level of support.
My only regret: that I didn’t move to WP Engine sooner.”

– PHIL SIMON, AUTHOR OF THE AGE OF THE PLATFORM

We don’t host with WP Engine – we have our own hosting facilities, located in a place where there are high speed internet pipes in and out of the facility and our Chris Butler is always monitoring the performance of our site.

Hopefully you get my point – the foundations of our web/blogsite are rock solid and this is a primary factor in why I can rank so well for something like Digital Marketing Expert.

I started at ” this end ” of the factors because typically most people start at the other end. They have got a requirement for a website and whilst they think about the design of the website and what it needs to say they don’t think much about the ” infrastructure ” of that website.

You can sort of understand that but I didn’t get to the top of searches by worrying about design. WordPress is pretty much our default ” software ” for websites because we know that using WordPress we get great ranking results. We also know that there are a host of great plug-ins built for this environment and that there are thousands of people out there with WordPress knowledge if we need help. There are tens or hundreds of great ” themes ” to use.

Certainly we subscribe to the ” Keep It Short and Simple ” ( KISS ) approach. Over complex websites are going to load and serve slower. You don’t want loads of fancy graphics or plug-ins.

I always say that there are a few different types of people who get involved in website design ( it’s an over simplification ) – Graphic Design and Marketing people. Programmers and S.E.O. people. None of those people have a deep understanding of the true objective of a website which is to sell things.

I am not just a Digital Marketing Expert – I am also a Digital Sales Expert and a Digital Businessman – as are my partners at Centripetal.

following the blog post

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2010/12/19/driving-internet-leads-for-uk-smb-using-hubspot-inbound-marketing/

We decided that we needed to create some ” Call to actions ” on the website and that these might include the completion of the sign-up form

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2011 to be in with the chance

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If you are looking for advice on Corporate Finance and M&A in the Birmingham area then take a look at the M&A Rainmaker website for practical help and information

Having started a Midlands based ICT business ( Voyager Networks ) in 1993 and sold in 1999/2000 Chris Windley went on to invest in a number of High Tech and other businesses with varying degrees of success. Last year he successfully sold one of these, 5i Limited, to Impera plc ( renamed 365iT plc ) which is currently on a buy and build strategy.

Following this sale, at one of the worst times in economic history and the earlier sale of Voyager ( at one of the best times for High Tech in history ) he documented the sales process used in both sales on the M&A Rainmaker website.

This has been added to with practical information about investing in businesses, marketing businesses and running the salesforces in businesses.

This blog is about targeted, researched cold calling. It is looked at from the perspective of an ICT reseller to the SMB market.

This is what I call the sniper rifle approach rather than the shotgun approach.

It is about targeting the types of company that you can ( easily and effectively ) provide solutions for. Actually, you are looking for prospects where your strengths and experience help you to outshine or get an edge over the competition.  

This requires at least 2 things:

1.       That you understand the prospect as far as possible both initially (  even before you have spoken to them ) and after you have met with them.

2.       That you understand the strengths and weaknesses of the solutions that you are selling.

So, this might lead, for example ( if you were a ICT reseller ) to you looking for companies with an  inbound and outbound calling requirement  ( say small sales departments or small customer support departments ) because you have good CRM to telephony integration. Or it might lead to you avoiding other prospects with say, warehouses,  because you don’t have cordless phone facilities
(    eg DECT )

What are your target markets and how do you describe them??

There are a number of ways to describe your target markets:

Horizontal size

You may be aiming at “ SMB “ but what does this really mean ??? 1- 10, 10 – 50, 50 – 100, 100 – 250, 250 + ???  ( A 10 person company is very different to a 250 person company )

Geography

You may only be interested in a particular geography or it may  be practical and efficient to deal only with a particular geography.  

Verticals

Where have you got references/case studies/testimonials ?? ( In other words so that when you talk to prospects you can say that you have worked with that type of firm and provided them with effective solutions ).

If you segment your existing database by customer/prospect and by industry you can see where your strengths lie at the moment.

You may have eg legal firms and accountants appearing to come to top of the pile of your preferred verticals. Are there any more verticals you should focus on ??

Structure

By structure I mean are they single site or multi-site ?? What departments do they have ? sales ? admin ? customer support ? manufacturing ? financial ? This is going to tell you eg if they have or need a WAN and also whether they are likely to need things like CRM/Telephony Integration or cordless phones etc etc

Financial Strength

Some companies are more profitable and cash generative than others. They can afford to spend more on ICT systems.

Growth Rate 

Some companies are small but rapidly growing and if so they need flexible, expandable systems and keep coming back for more.

Mindset

Some companies are forward thinking in terms of their use of ICT and some are not. ( If they have a good Internet presence this may e an indication of thier attitude to Information Technology.

Cisco’s classification

Interestingly Cisco recently proposed   a classification of “Elite “ users, “ Open to suggestion “ users and “ Basic “ users.

Your best customers

Another way of identifying your target market is to say “ Well we want more customers like …. one of our existing customers “ and we could describe them as being … ( use the above classifications ).

What I am suggesting  is that you get to the point where you can say  – these are our top targets. You can  then develop supporting collateral to help sell to those target markets. By analysing your existing database of customers and perhaps getting testimonials and case studies from and about some of them you will be able to build on a strong foundation.

You can then either acquire data for these targets ( N.B. Once you know who your targets are you need only buy data for those particular prospects – this saves a lot of money )  or  apply the internet search approach outlined below.

Lets say that you decide to target lawyers in Dorset

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

We Google them and we have a sort through.

Which ones are tiny, small, medium size ??

Do they have multiple offices ( ie they have a WAN and a LAN ) ??

Which ones have a good internet presence ??  ( ie they are high tech ?? )

Is there any news about any of them ??

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=lawyers+in+the+news+in+dorset&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

eg they are expanding,growing etc etc

we can usually get the partners names or a contact.

Maybe we can get an idea of numbers of staff ??

What can we predict about them ??

We can then make a warmish cold call ???? (or we could do a ” targeted mailer ” and then follow up ?? ) 

So you don’t really need lists of data to get started. 

Useful information on M&A

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mergers_and_acquisitions

An interesting article on David Wimers blog:

“Bring on the Rainmaker!”

more here..

http://davidwimer.com/?p=272

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.

http://www.wordtracker.com/database_help/keihelp.html

It’s a bit techie but I have just been thinking about this area quite a bit. It’s fully explained in the link above.

So, simply we are talking about finding “achievable” keywords where achievable means that you have a chance of ranking high in Google for those keywords.

A simple way of finding keywords that are achievable is compiling a list of relevant keywords and then typing some of those keywords into Google and seeing how many results you get

The other day when I was very grateful to BMW Sytner High Wycombe ( for fixing my car )  I thought that I would say so publicly in a few places. I Googled ” BMW Sytner High Wycombe ” and saw that I got the following results:

  Results 1 – 10 of about 2,570 for bmw sytner high wycombe. (0.14 seconds)

Oh, ok I thought, so not that many then { ” BMW sytner ” gives Results 1 – 10 of about 30,600 for bmw sytner. (0.42 seconds) and ” BMW ” gives   Results 1 – 10 of about 183,000,000 for bmw. (0.21 seconds) }.

I wonder if I can get something to rank on the front page pretty quickly ???

I know ( because I have done it loads of times before and because it is a pretty highly ranked website to Google ) that I can post something on Ecademy and it will sometimes appear within 20 minutes or so ( Google index’s every 20 minutes ).

So ( at the time of writing ) this Google

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=bmw+sytner+high+wycombe&meta=&aq=5&oq=bmw+sy

has this post

http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=list&lid=197573

In the middle of the front page. Hopefully BMW Sytner will appreciate the thought !!

As you will find out in a following post we are asking a couple of companies that we are working with to write a list of all the keywords that they want to be found for and then we are going to prioritise those and look at what we think we can rank high for pretty quickly.

I don’t really consider myself to be an expert at email marketing ( but I know people who are very experienced ) but I have a couple of views in relation to email in association with social networks ( Facebook, Twitter, Ecademy, LinkedIn etc ) and information sites ( Digg, StumbleUpon,Delicious etc ).

The main thing that I want to see is a weblink for the email, ideally with a relevant url and /or a share facility so that the email can be posted on the Social Networks and Information sites.

This is the weblink for The Glan Christmas email that we have just done. 

http://www.glanyrafoninn.co.uk/Mailshot/Glan-xmas09.html

http://www.cloudhosts.co.uk/cloudhosts-email.htm

for a number of reasons: It was in an area of interest to me ( cloud computing ) and it had a relevant weblink ( the one above ) and it had a share facility included. While I was looking around at the email I accidentally clicked on the ” Chat with an expert online ” button and that led to this conversation with Chloe:

Hello. welcome to CloudHosts. How can I help you today?

You are now chatting with Chloe

Chloe: Good afternoon

Chloe: Welcome to Cloudhosts, may I take your name please?

you: Hi Chloe

you: Chris Windley

Chloe: Hi there Chris! How can I help you today?

you: Hi Chloe, Got to be honest and say that I was looking at the emailer I just got and pressed the chat button by mistake !! I could lie but you know ..

Chloe: I appreciate your honesty! Is there anything I can help you with at all Chris? What did you think of the information in the email?

you: It is an area of interest and I was quite impressed with the email system ( and now the chat system !! ) !! You at FBT Media or UK Hosts ??

Chloe: I work for UKFast, which is a sister company of cloudhosts. We work closely with fresh business thinking to try and accelerate the business of our clients and new clients. I’m glad the chat system impresses!!! 🙂

you: Yep – I am impressed all around in fact I am blogging about this as we speak !! So I don’t waste your time let me review the email itself in more detail and come back to you. You obviously have my email and you can Google me for more info 🙂 Have a great day, Regards, Chris.

Chloe: Thanks Chris – please do not hesitate to get back to me my email address is chloe.green@ukfast.co.uk and my number is 0800 458 4545

you: cool Chloe very cool 😉

Chloe: 🙂 I look forward to hearing from you Chris

you: Thank you.

Now, Chloe is a really nice girl and it’s clear that email marketing is not only connecting into the Social Media space but also leading you into direct discussion with people like Chloe.

Of course email-shots can also tell you when someone opened the email, if they re-open it, if they follow any links, if they forward it etc etc

So, although email-shots can be described as ” Push marketing ” they also bridge into ” Pull marketing “.