Would you like a business grant that you can use towards a private training/coaching session with me to develop your Internet marketing skills?

Small business owners/managers are eligible for a grant of up to £1000 towards the cost of business training and development designed to develop their strategic skills to drive their company forward.

Take advantage of this grant funding from Business Link whilst it’s available, and as always the case, when the money is gone, the money is gone!

I’m able to develop a training programme designed for your specific needs, meaning we can skip over the bits you know already, and focus on what you really need to know to make your business more competitive on the Internet:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaigns
• Social Media Marketing campaigns:  Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogging
• Web design reviews
• Google AdWords pay per click (PPC) advertising
• Google Analytics and web metrics
• Improving Conversions
• E Commerce
• Email marketing
• International Web Marketing

One grant is available per organisation of up to a maximum of £1,000.  The first £500 is 100% grant funded, with an additional £500 available for you to match at 50%, for a total grant value of £1000.

Both business, public sector and charitable organisations with between 5 to 249 employees are eligible to apply. Organisations who accessed previous Leadership and Management funding initiatives from the LSC are not eligible. Funding is made available for the development of a senior manager or key decision maker.

Our training and consultancy services are a approved by Business Link in both the East Midlands and West Midland, and our training courses rated amongst the top three in the country.

Contact us to discuss your training requirements and learn more about how you can apply for a grant.

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I like to use Amazon as an example of best practice email marketing, but every so often even Mighty Amazon makes an Email Marketing Mistake:

I received this email message this morning from Amazon, offering me a Christmas deal in February:

How did this happen?

My email client software, Googlemail, does not display images until I ask it to, displaying the text only version first.

The graphic version should have looked like the image below.  Compare and contrast with the text version above:

The culprint for the Half Term offer is in the ALT text associated with the banner image containing the Software Half Terms Deals message. This text displays when images are turned off or are unavailable.

By right clicking on the banner imnage you can see the ALT text properties, and there is the Christmas Cracker:

I am frequently surprised by the amount of people using Google Analytics who aren’t familiar with URL tagging. This is the process of adding extra information to a link, so that Analytics can identify it as coming from a particular source, keyword and/or advert.

In fact, URL tagging happens automatically for all AdWords users – it’s how Analytics knows the difference between “paid” and “organic” traffic in your Search Engines and Keywords reports. But its use reaches far beyond AdWords. Consider an email newsletter or “e-shot”. If you make a plain, normal link in your email, the traffic it generates will be split between the Direct Traffic report and the Referral Traffic report.

Why? Because if you use an email client like Outlook, clicking a link in an email is like copying and pasting that link directly into the web browser’s address bar. If you use webmail like GMail, Hotmail or similar though, you are already visiting a website (the webmail site) and clicking a link is a referral from that site. So visitors from an email campaign will be split between the two. Worse, they will be lumped in with the Direct or Referred traffic you got that day anyway. Hardly the ideal method of measuring the success of your email marketing.

If those links in the email had been tagged, you could identify every single visitor generated by that email as a distinct group. You could then measure their engagement (time on site, pages per visit etc.) and their conversion rate, as well as making them an Advanced Segment to delve deeper into their visits and compare them to other groups of visitors, or even the last email marketing you did (if that was tagged too).

How does it work then? Pretty simple, as it happens. You simply need to add some information in Google’s defined format on to the end of the link addresses in your email. It looks like this:

http://www.website.com/page.htm?utm_campaign=campaign-name&utm_medium=marketing-medium&utm_source=website-or-email&utm_content=advert-content

Looks exciting eh? If you break it down, you have a list like this one on Google’s help page:

So:

• Source is the place that the visitor comes from
• Medium is the type of marketing (cpc stands for Cost Per Click and is the standard term for defining pay-per-click advertising in Analytics)
• Term is the keyword used (or any other defining feature of the advert)
• Content is only really required for distinguishing between pay-per-click advert content for the same keyword
• Name is the name of your campaign, whether it is a specific campaign or maybe something like “Newsletters”

In the example of an email newsletter, I might define the Name as “Newsletters” and the Source as “December Newsletter”, thereby grouping all my newsletters in one campaign, but being able to distinguish between each month’s newsletter within that campaign.

You could also use the Content tag to define which link in an email someone clicks. For instance, you might link to the same page three times: once at the top of the email, then in the body copy and finally at the bottom in case people missed the point. If you don’t differentiate between those links, you won’t know which one got clicked on most, because they all go to the same page. So, my URL tag for the first link might look like this:

?utm_campaign=Newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_source=December&utm_content=Top

My URL tag for the body copy link would be the same, but it would say “utm_content=Body” at the end instead, and so on. If you don’t want to mess around writing your own link tags in HTML, Google provides a URL Builder here.

The uses for URL tagging don’t end there, as you can tell from the table. If you do any pay-per-click (CPC) advertising anywhere but AdWords, you won’t be getting the URL tagging automatically, so traffic from the likes of Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN AdCenter will be appearing as either Direct or Organic traffic, meaning you have no information on the performance of those paid-for adverts once the visitor lands on your site.

What about advertising on a site that also links to you organically? Again, all traffic will be referred, but you won’t know how much of it comes from the paid-for advertising. If you tagged your advert links, you would see those visitors as a distinct group. The same is true if you use Google Merchant Centre (formerly Base) to list your products in Google Shopping search results – if you don’t tag your Base feed URLs, all the traffic will be lumped in with normal Google organic traffic and you won’t see how your Shopping listings are performing. The screenshot below shows how Shopping traffic has been separated by tagging the visitors as coming from “base”, with Yahoo pay-per-click traffic also distinguished from organic Yahoo visitors:

By using URL tagging, we can then see the visitor engagement statistics for those groups, along with their conversion rate, per-visit value etc. It gives us much better information to use when deciding what works and what doesn’t in our online marketing campaigns.

If you want to learn more about using Analytics, I have Google Analytics training events scheduled for next year in London and Nottingham. You can see all my planned training events here.

My top 5 Internet Marketing tips for fighting the credit crunch.

The economy may be turning ugly, but the Internet offers small businesses opportunities to survive, and even thrive, during this recession we are all calling the credit crunch.

Businesses are looking more carefully at budgets, making sure we can squeeze every penny of profit out of our investments, and looking for the most cost effective ways of delivering our products and services.

And our customers are doing the same:  but they are still spending money.  They may be spending less, but we need to figure out what they’re spending their money on.  And they don’t want to risk wasting a penny.  They want to buy the right products, from companies they can trust.

And our customers’ use of the Internet will continue to grow – after all, it is free.

Marketing budgets may appear to be a soft target for businesses looking to make budget cuts.

But canny business owners will be taking advantage of the opportunities the Internet has to offer.

Here are my top 5 top Internet marketing tips for fight the credit crunch:

1.  Work Smart to Retain your Existing Customer Base

Out of sight means out of mind.  You need to keep in touch with your customers or you risk losing them.  And it is always cheaper to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one.

• Email marketing is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective way keeping in touch with your customers.  I’m not talking spam, and I’m not talking about marketing to get new customers.  You need to be sending out personalised, targeted messages to existing customers who want to hear your news.  And well crafted email messages make sales.

• Blogs are another free and easy way to publish information anbd keep in touch with your clients.  I am of the personal opinion that the majority of the UK population doesn’t know what to do with an RSS feed, but they sure know how to read blogs.

• Getting Social means engaging in conversations with your customers.  Qype, Facebook, Twitter:  these are places where you customers are reviewing your products, discussing their purchasing decisions, exchanging views on your business.  Use these tools to listen to your customers, hear what they’re talking about, learn more about your market.  And remember it isn’t about advertising, your contributions ot the conversation need to be valuable and appropriate

2.  Get Even More Visible in Front of Your Potential Clients

You have to get visitors to your website to make the sales.  And one of the best times to get found by potential clients is when they’re searching for what you’re selling.  You need to get found on the Internet, which means Google, but also means a range of other places on the Internet that your customers visit.

Spending on online marketing is continuing to grow, competition is getting more intense, and as a result it is becoming more expensive.

Now is the time to review which of the visibility tools are going to give you the best return on your investment.  Put together your plan of action for building your visibility on the Internet.

Your Tools Checklist:

• Search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, banner advertising, classified advertising, online press releases, affiliate marketing, videos, sponsorship programmes

3.  Make Your Business Transparently Trustworthy

You an do all the advertising you want, but consumers trust each other more than they trust your carefully crafted marketing messages.  I have previously written about the importance of customer reviews in building trust.

If you’re selling business to business, then recommendations from colleagues, friends, accountants, and business advisers all have the greatest impact on building trust.

• Case studies and positive stories about your business form an essential part of the content on your website

• Plain speaking in the words you write may look easy, but it takes time and effort to write well.  Make your web copy and email messages sound genuine, and not hollow marketing drivel.

• Cultivate customer reviews.   Sites like Google Local Business Centre, TouchLocal and Qype are platforms for customer reviews and ratings.  I know businesses are scared of negative reviews, but remember even bad reviews contribute to the sense of honesty and trustworthiness.  Keep an eye on your reviews, and listen to what your customers have to say.

4. Measure, Measure, Measure

If you don’t measure, then you can’t manage.  And if you’re not managing, then you could be pouring money down the drain.

Measuring means accountability for your marketing spend.  You need to be measuring against your success criteria.  You may want to measure sales, or email enquiries, or phone calls, or visits to your website.

• You may be using low-tech ways of measuring, like a clipboard near the telephone, and making a tick every time a person says they found you on Google.

• You might be using a dedicated telephone number that is associated with your Internet marketing activities, and when that phone rings you know the web is working for you.

• Or you might be using a web statistics package like Google Analytics, and set up your Goals and Conversion Tracking to see who well your website is performing.

If marketing budgets are tight, then knowing what works makes it easier to make the decisions of where to invest your cash.

5. Test, Learn, Test

And finally, there is no one size fits all answer to the Internet marketing puzzle.

You need to try something new, experiment with a technology or technique you haven’t used before.  Measure your success, and learn from the experiment.

• Experiments should be quick, cheap, and easy to deliver.

• If it works, then well done, and more of the same, please.

• And if it doesn’t work so well, then kill the experiment and move on.  No harm done.  Be quick and be ruthless.  You will have tested something, learned from it, and moving on to test something new.

Have you found this article useful?

Why not contribute to the conversation by adding a comment, or bookmarking the site using your Social bookmarks.

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I keep unsubscribing.  I keep complaining. And now I’m going public.  Those pesky Democrats in America are spam merchants.

Actually, President Elect Obama isn’t the spammer, it appears to be David Plouffe, his campaign manager guru who won’t take his foot off the spam accelerator.

I didn’t want to go public with the Democrats’ spamming reputation until they had safely won the election.  But now they have won, and it is time to point the accusatory finger.

The Democratic party use a piece of software called Party Builder to manage their hugely successful Internet election campaign.  A steady stream of emails asking for small donations proved to the key to financial success for party funding.

I’ve unsubscribed separate three times from their email broadcasts.  Twice the unsubscribes had no effect whatsoever.  The final unsubscribe took effect in August…. but the begging emails started reappearing in December.

As an expatriate American who completed and posted my proxy ballot, voting for Obama, I’m more than annoyed to be at the receiving end of spam.

The law they are breaking, of course, is the CAN-SPAM requirement to provide an easy and effective way to unsubscribe, or opt-out,  from email marketing.

Successful email marketing is getting the right message to the right people at the right time, and having the processes in place to respect the wishes of those wanting to unsubscribe.

Fix it, David!

Do you collect personal information on your website? You may have a Contact Us form, or a newsletter subscription form that collects names, email addresses, phone numbers, that sort of thing.

Are you sure your website is complying with the Data Protection Act in terms of how you collect and store that personal data?

More importantly, did you know that company directors and senior managers are personally criminally liable for in the event of failing to comply with the Act. And saying “you’re sorry but you didn’t know” is just not good enough.

The Information Commissioner has published a very useful Guide to Collecting Personal Information Using Websites (PDF)

I learned a few new things:

• how and when you need to display your privacy policy statement, and the principle of having 3 “layers” of privacy policy statements
• your responsibilities if your site collects personal data using “cookies”
• publishing personal information about staff or clients on your website
• restrictions on “scraping” email addresses off websites and using them for email marketing

Happy reading!