M & A Rainmaker

Getting an Internet listing is great, getting a testimonial is great but getting a Targeted Internet Testimonial ( T.I.T. ) is even better !!!

Ok, so someone is Googling for more information about something or to find somewhere to buy something.

For example someone wants to find a real ale pub in Holywell area so they type in ” Real Ale pubs Holywell ” .

Back come the responses:

here

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=real+ale+pubs+in+holywell&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

One the first page ( hopefully ) of responses ( in the natural, unpaid for listings ) you see one which says ” Glan Yr Afon Inn real ale pub ”

So, not an advert ( they are in the Sponsored Listings ) or a website or a directory listing or a self-promotion but A TESTIMONIAL or RECOMMENDATION from someone.

This Testimonial or Recommendation is from Jonathan and Ces Loftus on a website called Ecademy.

Question: Is a Testimonial or Recommendation like this more powerful than an ordinary Google listing ?????

It would be an option to have it come from anyone ( who is registered on Ecademy ). So, a business contact could register and provide a T.I.T. for someone. A friend could do it. A family member could do it. Certainly another Ecademy member could do it. It could also be any local businessperson, politician or celebrity. It could be a National or Global Celebrity.

Look here

http://creativelyminded.co.uk/nick_tadd_tits.html

for a series of TITs done about Nick Tadd’s Social Media Training Day by other people.

( So …. they don’t have to be on Ecademy either - they can be on any platform that supports html code !! )

To make this come up on Google you have to know what that person wants to be found for and you have to think about the competitiveness of those words or phrase.

Ecademy is a very powerful website ( to Google ) with lots of great, changing, content, inbound links and keywords and phrases.

Still some words and phrases will be very hard to rank for. ( Obviously not the ones that I have used ).

You can add pictures, graphics and video ( even more examples like this will follow ).

You can get the words done by a copywriting expert. You can enlist the services of an SEO specialist for the ultimate in targetting.

When you do your T.I.T. it can be copied instantly to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc so this will provide more coverage of your T.I.T.

You can also turn your T.I.T. into a pdf and make posters, leaflets, flyers etc etc

Yes, this is a serious promotional tool in your armoury.

Who benefits ?????

- The potential customer

- The person/company recommended

- The recommender get exposure

- Ecademy gets exposure

a win/win/win/win situation.

What do you think ?????

Please let me know so that I can add in your thoughts and views to my own deliberations.

Get your own TIT !!

I have long been aware of the power of a Marketplace advert both inside Ecademy.com and outside Ecademy.com ( on the Internet ).

Because Ecademy.com is such a powerful platform ( to Google ) much of the content posted there is picked up by Google and displayed for relevant searches. Testimonials and Marketplace promotions are amongst the things that are seen on Google and other seach engines.

You cannot guarantee to get ranked high on Google for selected words and phrases because it depends on how competitive the terms are. However, for reasonably competitive terms you stand a good chance of getting ranked high.

If you go here

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&rlz=1R2SKPB_enGB362&q=cisco+webex+dorset&meta=&aq=&oq=cisco+webex+dorset&fp=4ea42b1d61769dbd

you will see that ( at the time of writing ) via Ecademy and other platforms we dominate the search for people searching for Cisco Webex in Dorset.

I can give you lots of examples of achieving a significant Internet presence for selected terms via Ecademy.

My posts, like this one, tend to be rather text based. It was when I saw the work of Ces and Jay Loftus in particular that I thought that a graphically rich, visually powerful, Internet Testimonial or Recommendation could be produced that would rank high on Google.

On Saturday Ces and Jay launched a Targeted Internet Testimonial for The Glan Yr Afon Inn. Now it would be easy to make it rank for ” The Glan Yr Afon Inn ” so we wanted it to rank for something like ” Real Ale Pubs Holywell “.

At the time of writing this, if you do this search here

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&rlz=1R2SKPB_enGB362&q=real+ale+pubs+holywell&meta=&aq=f&oq=real+ale+pubs+holywell&fp=a73fa2ac306dd28e

This Ecademy Marketplace advert here

http://ca.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=list&lid=200364

is at the top of the Google search.

When you click on the Google result you get a lovely, graphical, Internet recommendation.

However, we have NOT yet even SEO’d this Marketplace advert !!!!

We can produce a Marketplace based Targeted Internet Testimonial for anybody about anybody and there’s more…….

Once we have produced this Testimonial we can transfer it to many different places and formats:

It can go on your blog or website..

It can be made into a pdf..

It can be emailed to your customer base ..

It can be printed for use as a poster, flyer or brochure insert ..

and these are just some of the uses of this Testimonial.

We believe that it is much more powerful for a Recommendation or Testimonial to come up as the result of a Google search than a Directory listing, or some random landing page on your website …..

But let us know what you think because we are still developing our idea …

or to put it slightly differently - the number of visitors to your website, the number of those visitors that participate in a call to action ( do something ) and the number of those people that become customers - THAT is the mantra of hubspot.com.

They say that last year they had something like 2 million visitors to thier website of whom 160,000 participated in a call to action and of those about 1,000 became hubspot customers.

It’s a mantra that ALL businesses could do with keeping in mind.

Let’s have a look at this a bit more closely….

Getting Found/Getting Visitors

Hopefully most people now understand that being found by Google when someone types in your company name or a variation of it is a given - if that does not happen then you have not even left first base !! However your objective should be to be found for the products and services that you offer. Ideally you want to be on page 1 when someone searches for your key products and services. How easy or hard this is to do depends entirely on the competitiveness of the keywords and phrases that relate to your products and services.

 Getting found for what you have to offer is absolutely key.

Recently I have been having two in depth discussions with people that I am helping:

1.  Tell me the most important products and services that you want to sell ( List them all and then put them in order of priority ).

2. Tell me what keywords and phrases you think people will type in ( to Google ) to find your main products and services.

I don’t expect them to know every variation of keyword or phrase nor do I expect them to know how competitive ( how hard to rank high for ) those keywords and phrases are. I can find that out myself or with the assistance of my team.

The next thing that I tell them to do is to

3. Get Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools installed on thier website and to get access to it ( for which they will need a Googlemail email address ).

The reason for this is that we need a baseline ( a starting point ) to see the effect that we have on things like visitors, keywords, referrals, links etc etc

Understanding  what you want to promote and the keywords and phrases that relate to it  is the foundation of everything that you will do on the Internet to promote yourself and get more visitors to your website.

The basic key to a high ranking website is on page SEO ( keywords, titles,metatags - related to your keywords and phrases ) , frequently changing and updated, relevant content and lots of ( good ) inbound links.

In thier ” Getting Found ” section Hubspot highlight SEO, Blogs and Social Media. These are the basic areas to address to improve the visibility and ranking of your website:

- SEO your website ( titles,tags,content etc ) in accordance with your keywords and phrases.

- Establish ( seperate ) blogs

- Establish pages in social media ( Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg etc etc etc )

In doing so you will establish an ” ecosystem ” of related online media. You will establish a network of friends/followers/etc for your blog(s) and for each of your social networks and you will also connect them to your website and to you ( they may come to you about business direct from your blog or social media page or they may come to you via your website ).

It is difficult to describe just how powerful this set of interconnected networks is. Facilities like ” share ” and ” join ” enable you to share information posted in one place to all the other places and to invite your friends from one place to another place.

Anyway, by now it will be time to look at your analytics to see where the traffic and links are coming from and how many visitors you are getting now.

Once you have got visitor to your website you have got to get them to do something.

Convert

On the hubspot home page ( thier main landing page ) you will see a number of ” calls to action ” e.g. ” Try Hubspot free for 7 days ” or ” Download a free Inbound Marketing Kit “. To do this you will need to provide them with information about yourself . This might range from a name and email address to a more comprehensive list of details about you and your requirements.

Each one of these is a ” lead “. You have converted a visit to a lead. ( Well done ).

As Hubspot mention - you need to track and manage these leads - then you need to analyse them -  so many referrals to the website came from ?? and they eg downloaded a white paper and then they did ??

Analyse

Analysis would include online and offline analysis. You want to analyse how well your marketing is doing; look at your competitive analysis ( how well are you doing relative to your competitors ) and also look at the quality of the leads. You should ensure that everyone in the company asks where leads came from - and not just ” from the Internet ” - you want to know whereabouts on the Internet !

A couple of important links for Inbound Marketing:

http://inboundmarketing.com/

http://mcdn.hubspot.com/Hiring_In_The_DARC_Ages_HubSpot_eBook.pdf

http://www.hubspot.com/

I will come back to these sometime.

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. 

Yesterday I was at my pub,  The Glan yr Afon Inn in North Wales, for the review of our sales over the Christmas and New Year period.

I was online using the BT OpenZone connection that we have in the pub when I heard the manager Ian guiding in some visitors ( if you follow your Satnav rigidly to CH8 8HE you just end up going up and down the A55 forever ! ). A couple eventually arrived with a young black labrador ( who was equally welcomed in ) and explained that they were travelling from Holyhead to London had been delayed between Holywell and Holyhead ( it looked as though there was an accident or something ) and had phoned thier son and asked him to find them a place to eat using the Internet somewhere near Holywell. He had found The Glan.

This was not a surprise as we come up on many different, relevant Internet searches eg

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=pubs+in+ch8&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

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

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

and we do so via Google maps and various other natural listings e.g. via our website itself ( which has been SEO’d to some extent ) and pub directories and social networks.

Also we now have about 40 reviews online some of which are fantastic like this one 

The Glan Yr Afon Inn, Holywell‎  By Young couple - 11 Aug 2009 Positive: Wonderful reception when we finally arrived (not until midnight!!), friendly and helpful staff. Lovely location and peaceful. One of the best places that we have stayed. …‎ www.booking.com/hotel/gb/the-glan-yr-afon-inn.en.html?…

so in many ways we expect to be found by people searching the .net but there is still great satisfaction in doing so.

When people register to stay with us we ask then how they heard of us so we know that we get a lot of people from the Internet.

The Booking.com website is a particularly useful source of customers for us

http://www.booking.com/hotel/gb/the-glan-yr-afon-inn.en.html?aid=307415;tab=4

and we registered with this booking site after a global review of what websites came up when people tried to find eg bed and breakfast in Holywell from a foreign country like the USA.

We do use more traditional forms of marketing like advertising ( in local papers and magazines ) and we have particular success with postcards that we give away in the pub and are sent to people all over the world. We put up posters regarding events that we hold.

We also have a database of customers that we have collected over the years and we use this to send email and snailmail shots out. Here’s our latest newsletter which we send out by mail, post and have available in the pub:

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

We also have video’s on the Internet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1YGFgQHsno

an online historical society

http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=club&c=5300

a blogsite

http://glanyrafoninn.wordpress.com/

a Twitter page ( with 494 followers )

http://twitter.com/GlanYrAfon

and a Facebook page ( with 152 members ) 

http://www.facebook.com/chris.windley?ref=name#/group.php?gid=25701627254&ref=ts

The historical society page, blogsite, Twitter page and Facebook page all need regularly updating with fresh news and pictures.

All of this is certainly great for sales and surely makes us one of the most connected pubs in North Wales, the North West and the U.K. !!

Over Christmas and New Year I have been thinking about the history of marketing and in particular the growth of what is known as push/pull marketing . When Googling both subjects Wikipedia provided some interesting information here

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

and here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push–pull_strategy

and in particular it provided the following ” Timeline of Innovation ” which was interesting because I was trying to build up a picture of how we have marketed historically, what technologies we have used and which are ” Push ” and which are ” Pull “. 

Timeline of innovation

• 1450: Gutenberg’s metal movable type, leading eventually to mass-production of flyers and brochures
• 1730s: emergence of magazines (a future vector of niche marketing)
• 1836: first paid advertising in a newspaper (in France)
• 1839: posters on private property banned in London
• 1864: earliest recorded use of the telegraph for mass unsolicited spam
• 1867: earliest recorded billboard rentals
• 1880s: early examples of trademarks as branding
• 1905: the University of Pennsylvania offered a course in “The Marketing of Products”^[4]
• 1908: Harvard Business School opens
• 1922: radio advertising commences
• 1940s: electronic computers developed
• 1941: first recorded use of television advertising
• 1950s: systematization of telemarketing
• 1970s: E-commerce invented
• 1980s: development of database marketing as precursor to CRM^[5]
• 1980s: emergence of relationship marketing
• 1980s: emergence of computer-oriented spam
• 1984: introduction of guerrilla marketing
• 1985: desktop publishing democratizes the production of print-advertising
• 1991: Integrated marketing communications gains academic status ^[6]
• 1990s CRM and IMC (in various guises and names) gain dominance in promotions and marketing planning^[7],^[8]
• 1995-2001: the Dot-com bubble temporarily re-defines^{[citation needed]} the future of marketing
• 1996: identification of viral marketing
• 2000s: Integrated marketing gains acceptance and in 2002 its first dedicated academic research centre^[9],^[10

Although Wikipedia talks about marketing emerging as a discipline in the 1900’s it was clear to me that marketing was going on long before the 1900’s and this is also clear from the above timeline.

As this article says

http://technorati.com/business/article/the-new-push-pull-marketing/

Push/Pull Marketing itself has been somewhat redefined or understood by marketers over time into something that is pretty simple - some types of marketing are about pushing information to the potential customer and some are about the information being pulled by the potential customer. This is my definition aswell.

What I was curious about was what historically we had done ?? Pulled information or had information pushed ??

I was thinking back to the days when ” business ” was a shop, place of manufacture or an office. It seemed to me that in those times the place itself ” Pulled ” customers - you could argue that thier very presence was ” Pushing ” but I don’t think so. Whilst some businesses may have monopolised the supply of goods or services in a particular area the potential customer essentially visited these premises of thier own free will - much like they now visit websites on the Internet.

It also occurred to me that Word of Mouth ( WoM ) was very important to the business owner and I will assume that these owners adopted mainly a pull approach as they met with various potential customers at Church, the alehouse or other local meetings. They could well have been rather pushy people but I like to think not !

I could also imagine them sending business and personal letters ( although I could not quite imagine a mailshot by stagecoach !! ), keeping records of clients names and addresses ( a database ) and perhaps even giving people ” flyers ” or  putting up ” posters ” .

” Flyers ” and ” posters ” sounds like ” Push ” marketing to me and it was interesting to tie this in with the first item in the timeline - mass ( machine ) produced  flyers and brochures. Then we have the emergence of magazines in the 1700’s and newspaper advertising in the 1800’s.

Clearly there were posters everywhere for them to be banned on private property in 1839 and ” Flyposting ” (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyposting ) has been a problem from then until now.

In the 1860’s we have the emergence of the postcard ( http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/DSphotosea6G1.htm ). Advertising on postcards was allowed from 1872.

So, in the late 1800’s we have push marketing using leaflets and posters and advertising on postcards and in magazines and newspapers. This continues to this day !!

How fascinating to see that at the same time we have the use of the Telegraph ( http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventions/a/telegraph.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph ) for the first case of unsolicited spam !!! So we ( mostly Americans ) have been suffering from Spam since 1864 !!!! and there we were thinking that it was a 21st Century plague !!

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s we have the concept of ” wired ” and ” wireless ” communications emerging with morse code over wireless signals giving way to voice radio and the first case of radio advertising in 1922 and morse over wired communications ( 1864 ) giving way successively to telex, the telephone and computers up to the 1940’s.

At the same time television advertising first starts in 1941.

We now see the various strands of Technology,Media and Telecommunications ( T.M.T.) being formed with Television,Radio and Newspapers/magazines normally described as ” media “. Media is defined as various means of communications such as Televison,Radio and Newspapers. 

Also forming are the strands of Voice, Video and Data where Voice emerges from the ” wired ” strand that begins with the cables laid for Morse transmission and Data develops from computers and Local Area Networks ( LANs ) to Wide Area Networks ( WANs ) that utilise the ” Voice ” infrastructure initially ( until Internet Protocol - IP  lines become available ). Video used seperate networks and protocols for a long time.

Mobile phone networks are an offshoot of wireless radio networks developing from about the 1950’s to First Generation phones in the 1970’s and Second Generation in the 1990’s.

Another development from ” wired ” communications was video conferencing that worked initially over the ” voice ” networks and then later over the IP networks.

The Internet and the Internet Protocol has become the great converger. All forms of communication, voice,video,data,wireless and mobile utilise the Internet now, wholly or partially.

It is quite clear that we have an almost insatiable desire to connect to one another, to communicate and to obtain or access information. No surprise then that Googles Mission statement is ” to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

It is also clear that what initially starts as a means of people communicating or of providing information or entertainment becomes a means of marketing pretty quickly. e.g. printing presses lead to posters and leaflets being produced; wired telegraph quickly led to spam being sent; wireless radio quickly had advertising as did TV; telephones were quickly used for telemarketing; computers and email again produced spam; Internet websites ( and Internet search engines ) carried advertising and mobile phones began to be used for SMS adverts and more spam.

It is quite amusing that in the first instance some people resist or just don’t believe the technologies mentioned will become important or main stream  ( e.g. telephones,computers,mobile phones     ) and then we resist or don’t believe that they will be used for marketing. It is quite clear that any and every form of communication provides the potential for marketing use and more than likely will be.

Looking at some of the current technology options we can determine if or to what extent they are used for push or pull marketing:

Telephone - originally a communications device , tele( push ) marketing has been going on since 1950’s, can be ”pull” when used to take calls ?? 

Fax - originally a comms device, fax-spamming ( push )  widespread, not interactive though.

Video conferencing - communications and “pull” eg webinars ??

Computer based email - comms. and computer based spam ( push )

Video ( TV ) - informational, entertainment, adverts are push but you can ignore them and some are so good they are watchworthy ! & we have such channel choice and programme control now..

Video ( eg YouTube ) - entertainment, pull marketing

Radio ( Terrestrial ) - informational, entertainment, adverts are push - can be annoying. Programme control.

Radio ( Internet ) - better ?

Mobile phone - originally comms. SMS spamming but not excessive ( networks control ? ), Internet access widens scope.

Newspapers/Mags ( Offline ) - dying ?? adverts are push but non-invasive ??

Websites - in general pull ??? e.g. forums, directories, social networks, instant messaging, click to chat, click to call etc

Printed media ( Posters,flyers,postcards,snailmailshots ) - definately a lot of push in here !! ( but posters and postcards are pretty passive ?)

Word of Mouth - pull.

 So, what, historically was the situation with regard to push/pull marketing and what is it now ??

It seems to me that despite there being many push marketing applications today there are lots of pull marketing ones. Historically we might say that we used to meet or find people or businesses and then we would communicate with them and then perhaps do business with them. So it was historically a pull dominated situation. 

It seems to me that we are increasingly returning to our origins in that ( particularly with the advent of the Internet ) we find people and suppliers, we communicate with them and then ( maybe ?  ) we buy from them.  

Although there are still many types of push marketing utilised ( e.g. telemarketing ) some forms of push marketing have been so modified that they are fairly innocuous ( television advertising ) and even enjoyed whilst most Internet based marketing ( excluding e.g. spam email ) is pull based. It is also true to say that spammers are already at work in, for example,  social networks so the tradition established with telegraph networks in 1864 is still prominent.  

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.