You should pursue both Google Adwords and SEO at the same time – because they both work together for the same end.

20% of SEO On Page Optimisation

SEO is a long term strategy.

About 20% of the whole thing (in my opinion and experience) is about on-page optimisation. This means about 20% of the whole job is making sure you are optimising for the right words.

Traditional SEO people look at keyword research tools such as the Google Keyword Tool as well as other word tracking tools and real-time search results and change the structure of the site, the information in the title and description, the internal linking structure and the website copy itself in order to make changes to your ranking in the search engines.

It’s an art and not a science. Opinions often differ about the best way to do it.

80% of SEO is reputation

In short, who links to you and how important and relevant they are to your business.

As such, I often advise clients (especially smaller business owners) NOT to spend excessive amounts of time link building. A lot of sites don’t want to share link juice, especially if you are a “for profit” organisation. So linking in this way is slow and hard to engineer.

Digital PR on the other hand, may be a different kettle of fish if you can come up with the right story and release it in such a way as to generate many new inlinks to your site.

SEO has it’s place, but it’s a long trek, not a short sprint. Success is never guaranteed and you should steer clear of anyone who promises guaranteed results.

So where does Google Adwords Fit In?

Google Adwords is a short, medium AND long term strategy.

Here’s why…

• Adwords offers instant, fast, turn-on-and-off-as-you-need, traffic.

This means that it’s great for short term marketing campaigns and offers where SEO is too slow to respond to your campaign needs.

The capabilities of Adwords means that you can turn your business strategy on a dime without breaking a sweat. To give you a real life example, I just helped a business do exactly that this morning. To all intents and purposes right now, our advertising is going out to a completely different market segment to test how it responds.

• Adwords shows you the best words to use for SEO

You can pick a ton of words you want to optimise for, but how do you know if they convert visitors in to customers?

You see, your business should be concerned not just about traffic, but the right kind of traffic which brings you the right customers and the right revenues.

• Where you already rank well on Page 1, Adwords offers dominance

You can get up to 14 times more traffic from being in the number 1 spot compared to the number 10 spot on page 1 of Google. If the page you want to rank on is really important, it’s worth advertising twice on that page. Adwords means you can choose your preferred position on the page so you get twice the chance of being seen

• Where you don’t or can’t rank well, Google Adwords gives you visibility

It’s impossible to optimise for everything.

It would take too long and cost too much.

Google Adwords however, allows you to invest in an incredibly broad (and yet targeted reach) which SEO by nature of its limitations, cannot achieve.

Conclusion

So the answer is both.

Every marketing plan needs both short and long term strategies and no single advertising medium (whether climbing the search engine rankings slowly or using Google Adwords campaigns) offers a universal panacea.

The best marketing plans always use a mix of strategies to creat business.

If you need help with your Google Adwords campaign or a robust marketing strategy, call me on 01392 477 465 to discuss your needs and find out how I can help you.

For a no obligation discussion of your company’s needs – call us 01392 477 465 today.

Google Adwords Management

As more advertisers discover the real power of Google Adwords, more business owners are using experts to manage their campaigns. The results are better conversion rates and lower business costs.

Unlike other companies where your account is simply set up then left alone – all our accounts are actively managed – which means we’re constantly monitoring, expanding and improving your campaign to deliver you the best return on investment.

Turn Visitors Into Customers

Lots of traffic means nothing, unless you have a site that converts those visitors into customers effectively.

If your site isn’t turning visitors into customers, we can help you find out why, and work with you to create a site that turns more of your traffic into actual profit.

Online Marketing Strategy

What’s going to help you build your business best?

Email marketing? SEO? Adwords? Blogvertising? Digital PR?

Too many online marketing options can be confusing.

We’ll help you build a marketing strategy to capitalise on your strengths, your resources and your unique market advantages.

Google Analytics

Analytics data is latent market intelligence which can reveal remarkable insights into your business.

We can help you see the big picture, not only by setting up the right data acquisition strategy, but helping you understand what your customers are actually doing.

Our clients find that we make life simpler for them. And more profitable.

For a no obligation discussion of your company’s needs – call us 01392 477 465 today.

Yet I know some small business owners who feel they must get their own “special” content management system for their particular needs. Of course, you can have anything you want in this world – you just have to pay for it.

And that’s why Wordpress works as an optimal, flexible and extensible solution for any start-up business, or a small business getting off the ground, or indeed a home-based business.

In short, no other content management platform (for me at least, and that includes Drupal and Joomla!) comes close to Wordpress for offering an optimal solution for managing web site content.

Here’s why:

1. It’s free, open source software.
2. It gives you complete control of content – something which is really important for search engine optimisation
3. You don’t have to use it as a blog. You can use it to build a site.
4. You can install it with the click of a button from almost any hosting control panel
5. It’s developed by communities of developers meaning it’s robust, and at any time, anywhere in the world, you can have thousands of developers working on solutions to common bugs, problems and hacks.
6. If you have a problem, just Google it. Someone, somewhere will have experienced exactly the same problem and solved it. That means solving problems faster, and less time employing developers to research and fix intractable problems
7. There are thousands of “plugins” which you literally “plug in” like lego to customise the functionality
8. There are thousands of free and paid-for themes meaning you can plug in simple designs
9. Want to change your whole site design? Just find a developer and get her to develop a new theme for you – no downtime, no messing about with static pages
10. It is AWESOME for search engine optimisation – especially if you’re a small business and you can’t afford the big fees the agencies charge for SEO.
11.  It is infinitely customisable. So it has all the benefits on squillions of people using it (support being one) and yet you can always make it your own.

This site is powered by Wordpress. I also know a few other companies using Wordpress. They include:

• Sony
• Ford
• Ebay
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• Ben & Jerry
• Cambridge University Press

Just a bit of food for thought before you ask your design agency to build you something “special”. Chances are you’re going to be paying the price for a long time to come…

Agree? Disagree? Leave me a comment or retweet…

And the Internet is a powerhouse because it brings that information, from everywhere, at all hours of the day.

And that’s the problem with information too.

There’s too much of it. Far more than we could ever absorb in a lifetime.

Information becomes disabling if we are constantly “plugged in” to look for the next opportunity, the next nugget of information which might make the difference to our business.

Information becomes disabling when we’re overloaded with it, and when Attention – also a highly precious and scarce resource is wasted by sorting through low value, constant interruptions (email, Twitter and Facebook being the biggest culprits)

Being in a state of continuous partial attention is both wasteful of attention but also significantly lowers productivity.

If you don’t believe me then look at the study where text message and emails have functionally reduced IQ more than smoking cannabis.

So what’s the take home on this?

• Invest in the right information. It’s more cost-effective than rummaging around the internet for someone’s “free article” about how to do it. (That’s amking a big assumption you can even trust the information…) Even when you find information you have to make all sorts of judgement calls about whether its trustworthy. Are you too cheap to invest in expertise, or your own business? Think about it.

• Recognise when additional information gives diminishing returns, and cut your losses.

• Value your ability to focus attention and concentrate. Attention may be the most precious resources you possess.

• Unsubscribe from every newsletter you don’t make the time to regularly read, or which has low relevance for you.

• You don’t need to know everything. You just need to know what you need to know.

I could go on.  But that’s all you need to know.

Yes. I am a Twitter sceptic.

I’ve dipped my toe in because it’s my job to work out for small business owners how to market their companies in successful ways – and that includes looking at emerging communication means.

And I’ll tell you why first. And then why I may have to recant (and also why I have no problem with recanting).

Small Business Focus

You see, I’m a small business advocate. All my thinking and activity is geared around that.

Small business owners have two primary scarce resources: time and money. In small business marketing, owner managers often account for the latter, but less rigorously the former in measuring marketing activity.

If it takes you 10 hours to make £100 of value and profit, then strictly speaking, making the same £100 in half the time doubles your profits.

So what does all that have to do with Twitter?

Do the most important thing first.

Do the thing which will bring the most far-reaching results first. Then after you’ve done that, do the next most important thing. Then the next most important thing and so on…

For the vast majority of small business owners with limited time resources, I’ve been of the opinion that for the time and effort involved, Twitter requires a disproportionate investment to the results it will bring because of these weaknesses:

Targeting

Having 1000 followers looks great. But what does it really mean? Are they the right potential customers for you?

Time

If I told you that spending a good proportion of your day text messaging clients was a profitable thing to do, you’d laugh me out the room. But that’s what people are doing every day.

I haven’t met a small business yet for whom Twitter is absolutely the most important thing they should be improving on to increase overall sales.

The 80/20 Rule

Work on improving what generates 80% of your current business by 10% and you’ll make a lot more profit than improving anything that generates less than 10% of your entire business (I haven’t seen one statistic yet where a company claims more than 5% of its business comes from Twitter – and it was a high technology Silicon Valley company at that).

More Channels = Better Marketing?

Increasing the sheer quantity of marketing isn’t automatically best way of getting more customers. If your message is crap, it doesn’t matter how many people you reach.  Of course, ask enough people anything and they will eventually buy from you.

But the smartest way to improve marketing is to improve the quality of how you communicate with customers using tried and tested marketing principles.

So, enough scepticism.

Why I May Yet Recant

1. Microsoft & Google It’s been announced by Bing (Microsoft’s search engine) that they are going to include Twitter posts in search engine results. Google followed up the same day announcing it will add it too. That means that Twitter now has a greater mainstream potential to reach customers and affect search engine results (but we’ll have to see HOW they actually do it).

2. My Dirty Twitter Secret In the past week, I just came across a dirty little Twitter secret that may completely change my mind about it. Well, it’s not really dirty at all, to be honest. But if you’re not doing this you’re missing out on a massive networking opportunity.

3. The Amoeba of Change Right now, Twitter is still in the early adoption curve. That means it’s got some way to go until it’s totally absorbed by the masses. However, I have no doubt that will happen, and it’s going to happen because of mobile phones rather than computers. Twitter is getting ready for the mainstream and the right apps to broadcast it to the masses accessibly will follow.

4. Broadcast potential. The broadcast industry has leapt onto Twitter. It may well emerge to be the best way to get their attention – if you have the right story, tell it in the right way and can get it to go viral.

Conclusion… Do I Recant?

No. Not yet anyway.

The vast majority of people are NOT on Twitter right now. Twitter, I believe requires a disproportionate amount of time to do which substantially decreases any return on your investment of time.

And that is the acid test for any small business owner: you want to invest less time in marketing and get more profit from it.

When that opinion changes, when I’ve reached a point where I can say to a business owner “Twitter is the most important thing you should be doing right now” I will happily concede, change my opinion, and recant fullyy and unreservedly.

I used to feel incredibly shy about ‘selling’ my services. But I’ve changed a lot. And I want to explore how and why it’s changed in this post.

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Value your work. Value yourself.

Put simply, if you’re good at what you do, you can create value for others. And if what you’re doing helps other people, creates value, it’s perfectly right and acceptable to expect an equal exchange of value. Isn’t it?

No-one is ‘taking’ anything from anybody – unless of course you either don’t value your own work and the difference you can make, or you’re someone who sees the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I think it comes down to self-confidence, self-belief and self-esteem. These three are core business skills. You can’t run a successful business without building them.

It’s also about refusing to become an object commodity – more of which I talk about in my audio book and seminars.

It’s all about flow.

If you have a world view, or a belief system in which you believe that every transaction is taking something from someone else – your view of selling is going to be negative.

For me, things changed dramatically when I stopped thinking about money as money and profit as profit. Instead I began to see it as flows of value. Just like the water cycle. Just like blood circulation.

When you create value in the world in the right way, you create conditions for money to flow towards you. But it’s not going to stop with you. It’s also going to flow on to other people.

In the past couple of years we’ve seen how deadly it can be for the economy if that flow is stopped abruptly. Let’s face it, our economies almost tanked for a moment there.

 Economies and the lives of millions in those economies work precisely because money flows.

You choose how money flows

Playing devil’s advocate, it’s fair to say that in some parts of our economy, money flows in less healthy ways.

However, we also have a choice to take part in exactly how that money flows only when we’re part of the game. The bigger the part we play, the  more change we can make.

Anita Roddick, for example, changed the flow of money towards cosmetics not tested on animals. Guy Watson changed the flow of money towards organic farming with Riverford veg boxes.

Being part of the flow of money means you’ve got a greater opportunity to promote the values which you think should change the world – whatever they are.

The myth of ‘taking’ from someone else.

According to Nick Williams in The Work We Were Born To Do, if all the money in the world were distributed absolutely equally, we’d all be millionaires.

If you’re something less than a millionaire right now, don’t worry, you haven’t technically amassed your fair share of the world’s wealth yet…

Natural Born Sellers

Not all of us are natural born sellers. I’m certainly not.  But it’s a skill we can learn.

More important are the beliefs we hold underpinning what we do. You’ve got to believe you can add value to the world. That you can help people. And you’ve got to believe it’s okay to take your fair share of value back from the world in return for what you give out.

And you’ve got to believe that economies remaining in a state where there is a dynamic flow of money between people – is a good and healthy thing too. And if you have certain ideals, it’s got to be possible to hold true to them and still do what you do well – and there are plenty of examples of that.

So that’s why I’m no longer shy about selling myself or my services. I know I can make a huge and valuable difference to the business owners I help. So I feel okay about getting myself in a position where I can help them, and accept ‘value’ in the form of money as a form of appreciation.

It’s good to be appreciated.

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2. Come to a small business marketing course in Exeter.

3. Buy my audio book.

4. Join my mailing list.

I usually send an email out every 7-14 days.

In the meantime, if you want to ask me a question,
or discuss a project, here’s how you can contact me:

Email: rob@robburns.net

Twitter: @Rob__Burns (two underscores)

Telephone: 01392 477 465

I look forward to talking to you soon.

All the best,

Rob Burns

You get more formatting options and you can add pictures.

So aren’t HTML emails better?

Not necessarily. Take a look at this:

This arrived just this afternoon. Now, I’m sure it looks pretty once I’ve clicked to make sure all the images are downloaded. But that’s the whole problem. All I see is a black background and lots of little red crosses.

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75% of email recipients are using some form of Outlook.

And that means if you create an entirely image based email – your recipient has to actively do something in order to simply see what the email is about.

Because people receive so many emails nowadays, if you do this, you are simply erecting another barrier for your customers.

So if you do a HTML based email – don’t construct the entire thing out of images. If you must use images, then use them intelligently along with text – so you;re not left with a blank screen

Quite apart from anything else, it’s going to be more expensive to build in the first place because you’ll probably have to pay a web designer to put it together for you.

I don’t have anything against HTML emails. But I do know that wherever you oblige people to do something extra, the number of readers will always go down. Of all the people you send the email to, a percentage will not even bother to read it unless they really want to. In which case they have to manually download the images for the email.

I did download the images.

It turns out the email was actually very pretty. And it had a link to an Autumn menu (mmmm…) and a nice little voucher (woo hoo! Money off!) but I didn’t get to see any of that before because the entire thing was built in images.

Online or by email you have fewer than 10 seconds (or a lot less) to capture attention.

So short sharp, easy to read emails (whether in plain text or HTML) which you can read without manually downloading pictures are much more likely to get read and capture the attention of your customer in those vital few seconds.

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