Adobe Business Catalyst
Posted on 10. Sep, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing
Adobe Business Catalyst
We have just started playing around with Adobe Business Catalyst, and it is AMAZING! This is a fully integrated ecommerce system that gives you the power of multiple software suites, easily controlled from one central interface.
Faster WordPress – WP Super Cache vs W3 Total Cache
Posted on 03. Sep, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing, Web Design, Wordpress
We had a few websites hammered by big traffic recently, so we started playing around with CDNs like Amazon S3 and the like. After getting some pretty good gains from using S3 for video, we thought we would turn to our own website to see if we could increase the load times here.
After getting achingly slow reports from Google Webmaster tools, we realised we could spare a few hours to play around with WordPress to make it go faster. After what seemed like forever hacking around with the .htaccess file and WP Super Cache, we realised that, you know what, there has to be a better way Kevin.
So, like all good scientists, we benchmarked ourselves over at Load Impact. Below is the report we go from them.
How Google Places works – Improve your position
Posted on 24. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in SEO
Google Places is the new primary goal for SEO experts. As your website can sit, in most cases, at the top of Google, with a map, it is the most likely place people will click on when searching for businesses in their area. Google relies on a large amount information from a few different places. However, they claim the information that you submit to Google is the information that they trust the most.
Anyone with a physical address can submit their business to Google Maps. However there are a few things they do to make sure the system is not being manipulated. To make sure the basic information you submit is accurate, Google will ask you to verify it first by entering a PIN that will be sent to either your business address or phone number.
There are a few things you can do to improve your chances of being listed high, or on the front page, of Google Maps. Before we get into the nitty gritty here are three quick things to remember about Google Places
- There is a far higher value placed on information from authoritative listings, such as Yellow Pages, White Pages and other directories. The closer the information in Google Maps to your Yellow Pages listing, the better.
- It relies on your physical location. There is more emphasis placed on the city/suburb of the search than the keywords
- The more you try old SEO tricks to manipulate the results, the worse off you will be.
- Google Places relies on proximity to the centre of the location to determine which results are called up. If your business address is in a large city, and you are far from the centre, you are going to struggle to improve your listing position.
The Easy Stuff
- One listing per physical location. Even you cover multiple towns, don’t use two listings. Instead, use the description of your business or categories to explain the different services your business offers. Businesses with special services, such as law firms and doctors or health centres, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
- Use information as it would appear in the real world. People are going to be looking for you using your business card etc. You will also find your business listed by its real address in professional directories etc. You should try to be as official as possible.
- Do NOT try to “SEO” your business name and business listing. Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. Again, this comes back to directories and professional bodies, (authoritative listings), listing your business name. Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.
- Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. PO Boxes do not count as physical locations. The precise address for the business must be provided in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
- Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible. For example, you should provide an individual location phone number in place of a call center. Provide one URL that best identifies your individual business location. Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
- Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title, address or category fields.
The Harder Stuff
- Pick your Battles. If you have the chance to list your business in a small local area, do it. Do not try to go up against larger competitors in bigger areas.
- Try to get your address listed in as many places as possible. Add your physical location to every time you list in a local directory.
- Local citations are king. You should try to get your business and address listed in as many local addresses as possible.
- Good reviews through Google Places will improve your position. You should encourage your customers to write a review of you as much as possible.
The Australian Election – Who has won on the internet?
Posted on 20. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in Election, Social Media
All politics is local, unless you are on the Internet, in which case it is local and global all at the same time. Marketing and politics go hand in hand, but more so on the Internet, where people have the attention span of small children, and the emotional reactions to go with it. Often the leading edge of real world trends, the Internet has shown how business reputations, and legends, can be made good and bad by the slightest thing. Millions of dollars is being spent every year on online reputation management, for that reason alone.
Political parties cannot escape this trend. With the Australian Election tomorrow, we thought we would look at who/which parties have won the Internet war. We decided to analyse the political parties and their influence to see who has the online edge. The amount of information about online influence is staggering. If we had more time and money we would do this with every federal MP to see who is likely to take what seat. However, time is running out, so we have stuck with an overview. Maybe next time around we can create something more accurate and analyse the local level.
Google Trends shows that, over the last 15 days, the Liberals have been searched more frequently than Labour in all states except Queensland. Across Australia they have been ahead in both searches and news references. Obviously there can be a murkiness to these statistics, because people may not be searching for the federal labour or liberal parties, however there is no way of calculating the intent of users, so this is the best we can get. One an Internet search level, it is clear the Liberal party are ahead.
On a party leader level, Gillard and Abbott are neck and neck. Tony Abbott has been searched for more frequently for the last few months, and by subregion, he is ahead in all of the states. However, because the information pool is so small, the state level data is notoriously unreliable, so it is safer to look at the national information. Based on this information it is probably too close to call.
Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard‘s Facebook pages are among the top 50 gainers in the last 30 days. This is a sign that politics has gone web 3.0 with the use of social networking. We are hoping for a “Super Poke” from Julia Gillard, or maybe Tony Abbott will trade with us on Farmville. Again, a sign that Australian politics is become more like America, the party leader’s pages have almost ten times the followers of the party itself.
So who is winning? At this stage Julia Gillard has 66,867 fans to Tony Abbott’s meagre 12,259. Julia has picked up 480 fans today alone. Maybe this is a reflection of the Liberal Party leader’s understanding of the inter-tubes. The trend is reversed when looking at the party level, as the Liberal Party has 14,358 with the Labour Party only 2650. We should also mention the Australian Greens have 19,659 fans. All these statistics are a reflection on the users and the appeal the parties have. Not only is the Liberal Party’s website much more interesting than Labour, it is more active and has more content. If the election were called based on how many people “like” Australian political parties, the Greens would be sharing power with the Liberals and Labour would be a minor party.
Again, maybe as a reflection on Tony Abbott’s grasp of technology, he is not following anyone, and only has 603 followers. Julia Gillard on the other hand has over 43000 followers and is following over 20000, including us! Julia, and her team, have really embraced Twitter. Julia’s influence is in the top 95% of people on the web, with her Twitter account clearly the center of many hubs. This time, the Greens’ Twitter following is more representative of their offline presence, with just over 3000 followers. On a party basis, the Liberal Party leads Labour 6100 followers to 4400 followers.
Analysing the Twitter influence of the major Australian parties is complicated by the fact that they have such poor followings. They barely rank in the top Twitter users of Australia, let alone globally. The Liberal Party however only has an impact score of 9% while Labour’s impact is at 14%, again showing that Labour fans are move active in their use of the internet. According to Twinfluence, the Australian Labour Party has a velocity of 2,958 second-order followers/day (in the top 7%) and social Capital of 169.1 (in the top 13%), compared to the Liberals with Velocity of 20,132 second-order followers/day (in the top 2%) on in the top 9% of social capital.
Based on all this data, we can say that if the election were to be decided on the Twitterverse alone, this would be a clear Liberal victory.
YouTube
Based on the number of views for videos created within the last 3 months, the Liberal party are storming ahead with 407,000 views to Labour’s 282,914. Not only has the Liberal Party created more videos, but they are entertaining and watchable. The Greens are again showing similar online and offline strength with just over 82,000 views. Even though earlier in the week, we thought The Greens had the most politically engaging videos, it seems the general public don’t care.The Liberal party certainly have the most entertaining, with their string of Labour Lemons cartoons, which may have turned things in their favour.
It seems that if the internet were to decide the election, Moot would probably win again. However, barring any attempt at vote rigging by 4chan, we think the Liberals have won the Internet election, by a nose, with Labour coming a close second. In a perfect, crowd-sourced world, Julia Gillard would be president, the Liberals would control the parliament and the Greens would have a significant stake in the senate.
Australian Election 2010 Videos – Who is winning the battle?
Posted on 17. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in Advertising, Election, Marketing
| The Good: Good use of “Testimonial Style” Good location
| The Bad: Does anyone really talk like that? A list of complaints isn’t going to WIN votes
|
The 2010 Australian election is less that a week away, so I thought I would have a quick look at who is winning the battle for minds with video. Within the last eight years, across two election cycles, the rise of the internet, youtube and twitter has caused political communicators to change their tactics as they try to adjust to the way people consume media. Julia Gillard was already caught napping when she told Australia we should be “moving forward” over and over again at the election announcement. Twitter lit up with people counting the number of times she had said it. To make matters worse, her advisers don’t seem to care that people were already sick of the phrase before she uttered it.
Traditionally, withing advertising, you have to win the heart, and the mind will follow. Political parties are mostly poor at understanding this, content with listing off each others failures or successes in the hope that viewers are at home playing a game of i-spy. As a further example of how bored Australians have become with the “he-said- she-said” negativity, former Prime Ministerial wannabe Mark Latham and wastobe Kevin Rudd have had more quality air time than the other to contenders.
The Labour party’s video above is an attempt at winning over the hearts of working people in Western Sydney. Western Sydney is a key marginal seat and is being judged by other commentators as a bell-weather for the whole election. It certainly does a good job of engaging the viewer, with a good use of sound and dialogue. However I would question the value of listing complaints, which will probably do more to turn people onto other parties and independents. Another part of the video that doesn’t sit well is the language. All those embedded clauses makes it hard to follow, which takes people away from the message.
| The Good: Great language Easy to follow Positive message
| The Bad: Less engaging than a testimonial No emotional tie ins The message could become saturated
|
The Australian Liberal party’s main video above could not have been more of a contrast. Overall the positive message is good, and the way Tony Abbott speaks makes it very easy to follow. However over the course of an election campaign, I don’t know how long a message like this will last. Once everyone understands the main position points of a party, the video could just become background noise. There is also a missed opportunity of giving the viewer something to relate to. A quick look at Liberal Party.TV shows that they don’t have any “testimonial” style videos created. This could become a huge missed opportunity as the election moves into its final days, the message will become saturated, and people will probably start saying “I agree with what the Liberals stand for, but I just don’t like Tony Abbott.”
| The Good: Great use of emotion Great use of “action” Subtle Positive
| The Bad: Light on qual. information Unfortunate use of “move forward”
|
The Greens’ main video again uses a completely different style. It is far more subtle, uses far less information, and is the only one to show the “action” part of voting. Even though they have a budget many times smaller than the other parties, the Greens have probably produced the most effective ad. It has some detail in there, it gets the message across clearly, and it has the “real” factor. The voting part of the video may well be critical. Studies into the effect of influence has shown two BIG reasons to show the audience what you want them to do. The first is, unless people can imagine themselves taking that action, they won’t do it. If you want to get someone to alter their behaviour, the best this to do is show someone having a great time doing the new action. Second, you want people to be able to place themselves in the moment of voting, and you want to place the suggestion that they should vote for greens. Otherwise there is no emotional anchor for the action of actually writing down the vote.
The only real problem they may come across is that the video is a little light on information. Whilst it engages the viewers with the main issues of the election, it does not really show what the Greens are going to do about any of them. However, with both of the major parties content to sling rocks at each other, I don’t think they will need to list action points.
As far as the quality of the videos goes, the Greens seem to be ahead. In terms of money spent, we will probably have to wait until the end of the election, however it appears as if Labour, and their trade unions, have it by a nose. How the Greens will benefit from this is, again, something that is yet to be decided.
Finding your strongest link sources
Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in SEO
Generally speaking there are three rules of thumb to ensure you are searching for the strongest link sources to build relationships with.
- The first is that the website AND page are both relevant to your business.
- Second you want the website AND page to be well ranked and have a high level of authority FOR YOUR KEYWORDS.
- Third you want the website to have high traffic and to pass that traffic on to your business.
There are a few different ways you can find these links, and mostly you will have to do this by hand. The strongest links can be found by using the following tools;
You can use this tool to find directories that already rank well for your keywords. This will ensure that you are getting links back from websites that are building strong profiles and already have traffic associated with your keywords. After using the top directories from this search, we increased our pageviews by about 10% and we increased our ranking by a few points on some keywords. We get, overall, around 30% of our traffic from a few well placed directories.
Google Blog Search
Use this to find blogs that rank well for your terms and have posted information about your industry. Blogs are great for building relationships with because they already understand about traffic and the value of links.
This is by far the best tool for finding out where your competitors are getting their link value from. It assesses every page against a range of factors to find out how much authority that link is passing.
This is an excellent resource for finding other websites that offer links and are looking to trade links in your industry. The best thing to do is, before accepting a link, is check out the website on opensite explorer and check their pagerank. This will give you an idea of whether the website is serious about link building or not. Some of our strongest backlinks have come from website that we have found in Link Market.
Links that you should be wary of
We are still vary wary of the effort to result value of article directories. Over the course of a year we probably have over a hundred links back to this website from articles we have written. However they are some of the lowest ranked links, as well as the lowest trafficked links, we have. They are probably not bad for a website when it is starting out, however very few, if any, of the website we compete against or use gain anything from article links.
Paid for links
We never pay for links, not even in the Yahoo directory. The main reason we question the logic, again, goes back to where your money is better spent. If you are only paying $5 for a link, then is the link even worth that much? If you are paying over $100 for a link, would you be better of sponsoring a local table tennis club? What about it you spent the money on a Facebook campaign?
Ultimate Guide to Increasing web conversions
Posted on 13. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in SEO, Web Design, ecommerce
Turning your website from a drab static website into an exciting lead producing machine can take time and money. Here we have a long list of lessons we have learned over the years to produce the best web design that converts readers into customers. First though, here are some quick tips;
- Optimising your website for conversion is an ongoing long term initiative, a few quick points from this page will not make your website the best it can be.
- Focus first on the offer, then the layout.
- Dramatic changes can yield dramatic results. - we once turned a 40% bounce rate website into a 5% by scrapping the theme and starting again.
Customisable. You should be able to make many changes to a template without spending too much time sweating over the code. You should also be able to do most of that through a CMS system or something similar. The easiest CMS Systems are Joomla and WordPress.
SEO friendly. Your website should at least be optimised for seo, that meant no flash, good used of H1 tags, css menus, title tags, meta descriptions and a HTML and XML sitemap.
Title and description Tags. These are the main tags that Google will use for your listing. Including the main city and your telephone number will increase conversions. Also making sure that the right products and services are included in your description will make sure you are attracting clicks from the right customers.
Accessibility. The best web designs work with all modern browsers and have W3C valid code. Up to 30% of
Remove distracting banner images
Strengthen the visibility of the headlines.
The offer should be easy to see and understand. A large dark headline with light background behind a features area will attract attention to the offer. The best web designs have all other elements balanced, so they don’t overwhelm. You should use short, direct, language that speaks to the user.
A clear primary call to action. Don’t just state “click here”. You should have action verbs that relate to the offer, like “Buy Now” or “Find Me”
Repeat the call to action. Drive customers to interact with you.
Use contrast. The more contrast you have, the easier the website is to read.
Keep the pages short and to the point. Whilst it is “en-vogue” to have a long page jammed with SEO Keywords, the best performing web designs have less content, more focussed offers and several calls to action.
Content on the left, call to action on the right.
You need a two column layout, with the sales proposition to be the first thing that the user sees. Their eye will naturally track to the right, where you put your call to action button. When they use Google to search for your product you want them to see the offer first.
White background.
All research in readability points to having a white background as THE best way to endure copy is readable. To put this another way you should have black text on a white background. If the background is not white, it makes it difficult to use any other colours in your body.
Stretchable side areas (outside of the body)
Either you need to build your website at 1000px across with stretchable side areas, or have no side areas at all.
Reduced Javascript and CSS fed from the bottom
Cut down on javascript and CSS, have them in one file each and load them from the bottom. This will speed up the web page load time.
7 Marketing Blog Posts You Might Not Have Heard Of
Posted on 11. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing, SEO, Web Design, blogging, marketing sydney
As we recently wrote on our top blog posts, I thought I would find some of our favourite, but lesser known, posts about Marketing in Australia and post them here for you all to read. You can read about marketing all you like on websites like B&T, Marketing Mag and Mumbrella, but these blogs are the ones that offer unique and interesting insight outside of the mainstream.
Why the media love the Sex Party
Written Bret Treasure over at Free Beer, this is a witty look at Australia’s favourite party. Talking about cynicism, idealism and boredom in the media, this post hits the nail on the head over the political process, in the media, in Australia, especially in the lead up to an election.
More Healthy advertising Needed for McDonalds?
An interesting look at the marketing of McDonalds. McDonald’s has recently taken up a lot of space at Customs House at Circular Quay in Sydney. The playground is part of the new McDonald’s campaign ‘inner child’. The Defectors Blog is a good one to browse when you are feeling low. With their aim to “REVOLUTIONISE MARKETING and change the way we interact with the new empowered and “connected consumer,”” how can you not want to read what they are thinking?
Foursquare in Sydney Australia
Some interesting test ran by Social Media News into the popularity of Foursquare amongst users in Sydney at several locations in Sydney. They found that whilst foursquare is still relatively absent from the majority of the population in Sydney, Its clear Foursquare is getting high usage from Media professionals and business workers.
Applying the Four P’s of Marketing to AdWords
A great post by Reload Media on why you should get back to basics with your adwords campaign. Using the example of an Acoustic Guitar sale, they show how you can cover the four P’s in Google Adwords. They claim that the trick with Search Marketing is to create ads that possess an even balance of creativity and detail about the advertised product/service.
Is it Direct Mail or Junk Mail? Analysis of an inner city mailbox
It seems Chris Maloney is a spirit brother of ours, because his views on Junk Mail could have come from this blog in itself. As we have posted before, what is the point of posting something that is just going to go bin-bound. Over a preiod of one month, Chris received 25% of it was addressed to people who no longer live here and 50% of the mail received was unaddressed. Teh most painful thing about this waste of money is that it takes only a few more minutes of thought and only a small percentage more in costs to make this marketing work! We are with you Chris!
Are Facebook Ads the most effective advertising there is?
Echoing one of our own posts on the use of social media in marketing, Charlie and Business2 looks at a case study of Facebook marketing and how it worked for him. Claiming that Facebook.com is already breaking even on this advertising stream, Charlie showed how Facebook marketing can be targetted and very cost effective. Another great tit bit is that Facebook is not just for kids, as there are more people using it over 40 than under 20.
Crisis Management Means Doing The Right Thing
Brendon over at Tailored goes through some local problems with a positive steroids test at their surf lifesaving club. Brendon does a great job of using the case study to show how anyone can crisis manage just by acknowledging the issue and taking steps to make things right. It seems that even BP could have learned from Brendon.
Our top 9 Blog Posts
Posted on 11. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing, SEO, blogging
Seeing as our blog has gone from strength to strength, and now has a fairly strong readership, I thought I would show you, and summarise, our top 9 blog posts;
Online Advertising Comparison – SMH.com.au/Fairfax
We decided to create an ongoing series of posts on the choices available to marketers for online advertising. This post was one of the first we produced and was one of the longest. We also did posts on Stumbleupon and a few other online advertising options. We are still waiting on a response from Reddit, Digg, and anyone from Google Adwords. SMH were the first to get back to us on what it means to be an online medium in the advertising market, and they were certainly one of the most thorough.
Evaluating Content Sharing Methods
We took a look at a few different content sharing methods, and how to use them as a marketer. It was a broad overview, but it seems to have been quite timely for some readers, as it is our second most read post in the last 6 months.
Tough Mudder – A Marketing Case Study
Tough Mudder is every action man’s fantasy. It is a grueling seven mile race through muddy hills, cold water and burning bales of Hay. What started out as part of the Harvard Business School’s Business Plan contest is swiftly becoming a rising star of endurance races in America. During the Business Plan contest, judges felt that getting 500 people to put themselves through hell was a little optimistic. However in our post we walked through the things that really worked for Touch Mudder and how other marketers can learn.
Hidden Pizza Restaurant – A Wasted Opportunity
This was our biggest and most controversial series of posts. We still think it was a wasted opportunity both for Sensis and the pizza market in general. At the moment we are working on our own version, soon to be released. Most of the companies we work for are pulling back on their Yellow Pages advertising basically because of the reasons we outlined in this post.
A Comparison of Social Advertising – Digg, Facebook, Reddit
This was the kick start to our posts on social marketing and how you can use it for any business. Although we did not get ANY comments from the media we studied, we did dig up a lot of case studies. We found enough data to convince us that social media marketing can work and is great value for money. In the same way that businesses are sceptical of setting up a blog, or really starting any conversation with their customers, they are sceptical of social media. They really shouldn’t be.
Free High PR Directory Search Engine
This is a tool we built for us and our clients to search over 400 directories and find the best ones to list in. This is not just from a SEO point of view, but also from a traffic point of view. There are some directories that now give us over a third of all our traffic. As long as the directory is in your niche, and targets the keywords well, there is no reason why you should not try to list in them. We would question the value of spending time listing in more than 10 or 20, especially those that are not ranked well
Marketing Trends for 2010
We wrote a great overview for the marketing trends for this year. Covering mobile marketing, keyword inflation, smartphone apps etc, we went over the lot. One of the things that is certainly coming true this year is adwords cost creep. One of the major reasons for advertisers moving to other media is that the cost of advertising on Google is become prohibitive to all those without very deep pockets. We are hoping that by the end of the year Google will have a solution, but for now, it is just not worth looking at for most advertisers.
8 ways law firms can use social media
We were lucky because this post got picked up by a could of law blogs and it was promoted around the web. Obviously we can actually write well. It also proved the old addage that there is nothing like a list, at least as far as blog posts go. The main aim for the post was to show that even law firms can use social media in their marketing mix. Also social media does not have to be about facebook and getting friends. Linkedin can be used for recruitment and Digg can be used to track industry trends.
10 ways plumbers can improve their direct mail flyers
This post was in response to a swathe of plumbers that started knocking on our door, not just to offer to unblock our drains, but because they are working in a competitive market, and they want to increase their market share. There are a lot of things people can do to increase the conversion rate of their marketing, not just the usual test, test, test. The main thing Plumbers need to do is try something different from their competitors. There are loads of plumbers out there trying to get their slice of the same pie. The best thing you can do is invent your own pie and fish in a different pond.
Cheers to us! – just some of our recent triumphs – ecommerce, SEO, DMOZ
Posted on 09. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing
It has been a crazy year, with so many exciting projects going on, that sometimes it is easy to forget what you have done and how far you have come. So I thought I would launch the week with a small pat on the back for ourselves for some of the major events that have taken place, we have launched and that have rocked our world over the last two or three months.
Baby and Home
We have now launched and gone into SEO mode on the new Baby and Home website. Baby and Home offers some excellent, exclusive, products, for delivery across Australia within ten days. They already stock products like babycubes, Brother Max Bibs and a whole range of other great products. Over the next few months we will be working on building the website profile, ironing out the bugs, and helping add another 40 to 50 products to the website.
DMOZ
We got our first listing in DMOZ!
Product Packaging for Target
We finished our latest round of product packaging for a new product going into Target in the next few months. We actually can’t show you examples here, because it is all still top secret. However, once we are up and running with it, I am sure we will be able to tell you all about it!
We are STILL Hiring
As always we are on the look out for the most creative, most talented graphic designers. In the last 4 months we have taken on another 4 consultants in the areas of SEO and product design. Together, they bring around 80 years of marketing and design experience with them. He hope to expand our range of services offered to our clients, so that we can continue to grow your businesses in ways you probably never dreamed.
Comodo Partner
As part of our ongoing quest to offer the full business service, from conception to initiation, we have partnered with Comodo to offer SSL and ecommerce security products. This now allows us to streamline the build process of your ecommerce store. It also allows us to comfortably advise clients on the right levels of security for their business.
SEO Services
Our continued expansion of SEO services has meant that we now offer the full range of opportunites to best position our clients websites. We have access to our own exclusive Australian directory as well as our own range of SEO products such as directory and article search. We now have over 30 Australian companies relying on us to raise their rankings in search engines.
Sales Conference
Throughout July we took part in the marketing of a sales conference by one of our best clients LSE consulting. Within two day sthe conference was over subscribed, and for a time they considered moving to a new venue. I am sure we will have videos from this event up and running soon!
There is plenty more exciting news coming up! We hope that you will get to be a part of it!