The 5HITS

I recently got the International Kindle as a gift, even though I had been researching and waiting for the Apple Tablet, maybe to be launched on the 26th. I get asked a lot about the Kindle and why I got one prior to the launch of the tablet, aside from the fact it was a gift. From my perspective in comparing the Kindle to the tablet these are 2 very different propositions, and cannot really be compared:

For the Apple iSlate tablet, I assume the following:

• Larger version of the iphone. The interface is tried and trusted and integrates with iTunes and the App store, why not?
• Great interactive screen, scrolling menus, as with the iPhone
• Average to bad battery life
• Access and use of iTunes and the App store etc.
• Main use will not be to replace your laptop but rather extend your Internet access, i.e. lap browsing while watching TV or waiting for the train, reading websites while lying in bed, ever tried to do that on a laptop? and having access to the web outside of the office
• This will no doubt drive the move further toward cloud computing. If you have a mini or a laptop and a desktop you will be familiar with the issues around managing multiple files and emails on different hard drives. Reading emails on your lap on a tablet will be easy. Urrggh more emails less spare time…
• Drive new and better Apps, which will work better on a larger screen
• Bad solution for typing long documents with the on-screen keyboard
• The tablet will find new uses of its own, no doubt with peripherals attached

Read more…

Internet Apple Tablet, Compare, Kindle

Most advertising works as follows in larger organisations, right?

• Identify requirements re target market, product etc.
• Develop campaign to meet requirements
• Pitch to client
• Plan media
• Buy media
• Run campaign through proposed media
• Measure success
• Celebrate
• Ad agency wins award

Traditionally, Media = television, radio, magazines, newspapers and more recently banner advertising, paid search maybe given budgets in certain sectors SEO (Search engine optimisation) or social media such as Facebook or Youtube.

Everything is generally measurable for the campaign, everything is short term, switch on and switched off and budget driven. Run the campaign, get the exposure, drive sales. Unfortunately its not always that simple. Social media requires ongoing genuine conversations to be of value, natural search rankings require changes to the website which may need to be planned and take time, taking longer to get results than the campaign itself. So we have some ongoing or longer term solutions interacting with shorter term, campaign driven ideas.

So, why not build your own media instead of buying it? As a large organisations with advertising and marketing budgets why invest all of this into shorter term campaigns? You no doubt have a website with vast information on your products, their benefits and features? Why not extend this and build your own media, including information, tools, communities? In the past many news organisations have morphed into this area, they have a newspaper, add a baby site, dating site, car site etc etc. Guess what, more media for you to buy.

Theoretical case study in point

Theoretical case study and I labour the point, theoretical. Any relationship to actual events, individuals or organisations are purely coincidental. I promise. But consider this. I am say a CEO of a large food company with numerous brands. One of my brands makes breakfast cereals and snack bars for the health conscious professional females aged 25-35 years old, single or married with no children. I know she generally does the household shopping, goes to gym and cares how she looks, feels and takes care of herself.

My website is all about product, how great they are, low GI, good to eat after exercise, handy for snacking and so on. My site ranks well for product names and the brand which delivers some but not a lot of monthly traffic, my last campaign increased traffic to the site but with a lesser increase in sales.

My issue is that I am in a highly competitive market, competitors are doing deals with supermarkets for better shelf space. Supermarkets are 80% of my channel. When customers come in, they are often overwhelmed, time poor and will make a decision based on brand recollection and association or convenience and perception. Great!

Firstly I decide to get rid of focus groups, they are small, not representative of anything in many cases and the results are often influenced by the questions asked and the facilitator. People are naturally polite, especially when being paid and also generally relate to the what is known rather than what could be.

I get detailed keyword research done, understanding what the masses want and are looking for. I realise there are few searches in search engines for my products and some are on brand but that bounce rate is high, unles I have promotions, free give-aways or competitions. Fickle bunch…

Read more…

Business online, Internet, Online marketing, Search Marketing Advertising, Digital Strategy, Marketing, Media, Online

Bruce Clay Australia has finalised dates for the 3 day SEO training for 2010. Bruce Clay himself will be over to conduct the training from March 10-12th 2010. The course will be held in Sydney at the luxurious Observatory Hotel in the Sydney CBD and I would advise booking early. The last 3 courses ended up being fully booked and unfortunately having to turn some people away. Prior to releasing the training date this time, we already have 10 bookings, so would advise that you book sooner rather than later. Find out more about Bruce Clay 3 day SEO training here.

For those of you with less time and who think the 3 day training may be a little to hectic, we are also running our global 1 day Bruce Clay SEO training course in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane during 2010. The dates for the 1 day training are as follows:

• 17th February - Sydney
• 7th April - Brisbane
• 12th May - Melbourne
• 9th June - Sydney

Search Marketing

New business models for social marketers. Managing your brand on the web just got interesting. Sidewicki, the tool in your Google Toolbar allowing you to see comments made next to websites has been upgraded to allow you to view these for an entire domain, per the Google blog. You are pretty quickly going to get a view on what a business/ restaurant/ website is about using this feature.

On the upside, to comment users need a Google profile and also need some “trust” or “authority”, lets call it PageRank for profiles before they are published. As more people comment so this bar will rise. So you spam the sidewicki, as with search you will become invisible. But comment wisely and responsibly and you build an ability to influence an extremely important part of todays marketing mix.

Granted:

• Low use and understanding of Google profiles
• Not that hard to set up a profile
• Low use or understanding of Sidewicki, let alone having the toolbar installed

But

• Gmail, Local Business Centre and so on will continually enhance our understanding
• Google social will encourage all to set up profiles, also just to claim your own space
• Online profiles will continue to grow in importance and need to be managed

So this has the opportunity to bring power to the people. You want to book a flight and have some adventure, search for “air tickets to Iraq” and find the #1 ranking site, but low and behold there are numerous sidewicki entires about how that airline runs late, loses your lugage, are rude to customers etc. You still going to book with them?

In the future of search, if there were enough of these and the quality was good, why would they not Read more…

Internet, Online marketing, Search Marketing Google sidewicki, reputation management

New Youtube campaign released by Poise Australia on pelvic floor exercise videos. This includes 13 videos from Jane Simmons a leading advisor in this area. There are also a lot of competitors competing for this space such as Tena.

The Poise channel is professional and the videos, clear, branded and easy to recognise. I actually might do some pelvic floor exercises myself. So well done on the channel set up, be interesting to see if these will result in blended search results.

Optimising Youtube videos in this day and age is no longer a luxury, it is a must.

Search Marketing

Sub domains are always an interesting part of SEO and we often get questions about their status and when to use and when not too, use of keywords in the domain.

Using say this bedwetting example of a subdomain of a well known bed wetting product used in Australia. While this subdomain will appear if searched in the toolbar it does not appear when searched in the main results, in fact it appears non existent, just the main site is in the results. It is however in the index.

Any other experiences with subdomains, rankings and use of keywords in the domain.

Search Marketing

We have long been building paid and unpaid Youtube channels for clients, The great video shows some research on Australia specifically, using 3,000 participants. These go further to proving what Nielsen and Comscore say but with more detail. Great insights, you cannot afford to ignore youtube as a channel to market.

Having said that, you cannot ignore SEO. As more and more clamber onto the Youtube wagon if you want proper ROI, make the extra efford to optimise your videos propely. Also ensure you have an appropriate strategy for the videos on your site and those you make available on youtube.

Consider:

• Whats your objective, Youtube to website? or brand recognition?
• Do you know how to differentiate videos between those onsite and those on Youtube? Keep in mind hosting source and productID
• What search terms are you trying to rank for?
• Are your videos and video content aligned to the search terms?
• Are you measuring the results properly?

Search Marketing

Bye Bye those upfront buys

Great video on traditional and online advertising written to Bye Bye Miss American pie. If you are in marketing or advertising and pitch against some of the larger more traditional agencies you may relate to this.

Business online, Internet, Online marketing, Paid Search, Search Marketing Advertising

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Training Course from Bruce Clay here in Australia. We ran it in Tasmania, ratings and feedback were good, so now we are running it in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane during October 2009. Bruce Clay training is well known and our 3 day training course highly rated (4.8/5 average) for the 3 years it has been running to date. We now have added a 1 day curriculum which will run more regularly than 6 monthly as in the past. You can register here.

The course includes detailed material, live examples and

Where and when will the SEO training be held?
Brisbane - Wednesday the 14th of October, 2009
Novotel, 200 Creek St, Brisbane.

Melbourne – Tuesday the 20th of October, 2009
Stamford Plaza, 111 Little Collins St, Melbourne.

Sydney - Thursday the 29th of October, 2009
Menzies Hotel, 14 Carrington St, Sydney.

What is covered in the SEO course?
•            Achieving better rankings in search engine results
•            How to increase click-through rates
•            How to make your site more relevant
•            How to identify the best keywords for your site
•            What is PageRank and how to increase link popularity
•            How to identify and characterise your competition
•            How to analyse and edit your own content
•            How to avoid Spam
•            How to include Engagement Objects™
•            Designing and structuring your site in the right way to achieve better search engine rankings
•            Optimising the technical structure of your site to improve rankings
•            Ensuring your site is able to be spidered by the search engine robots
•            How to develop links worth having
•            Monitoring you and your competitors positions within the search engine rankings
•            Being ethical whilst optimising your site
•            How to measure your success

What is included?
Fees include the 1 day training course, meals and refreshments, a 1 year free subscription to the SEOToolSet® (valued at over $1,000) and a detailed course manual.

Bookings
Bookings can now be made at the following url: https://www.seotoolset.com/training/register_au.html

More information
More information on the 1 day SEO training course can be found at http://www.bruceclay.com.au/training/one-day-SEO-course.htm.

More information on the 3 day SEO training course can be found at http://www.bruceclay.com.au/training/index.htm.

Internet, Online marketing, Search Marketing SEO Training

Having recently undertaken this process of moving after many years from PC to MAC, here are the things nobody tells you but you should know before you buy and when you’ve bought. I recently moved from my Dell XPS 12″ running XP and Office 2008 to a Mac Book Pro, 15″ 2.8GHz.

Some considerations before buying a MAC

1. Everyone keeps on saying the Mac will run Windows. Yes, and in so many ways. This can be done using Bootcamp, i.e.. when you boot the machine it will boot straight into Windows, VMWare Fusion or Parallels. Both of the last 2 seem much of a muchness and the same price from reading up and talking to sales people no one could point to a clear advantage in either, other than VMWare was written later and thus could have better coding?. Price is around $120.00 and they allow you to run Windows virtually.. Remember when you buy a Mac the OS is built for the machine, so running Windows loses all those little tweaks, you are running standard software on a standard laptop not built for it. Also Windows will cost you. To get XP which most seemed to be recommended by most required buying Vista Business (The cheapest) at around $420.00 and then requesting a downgrade to get back to XP, ridiculous!
2. While the VMWare is neat and works well, it does crash every now and then and seems to affect the performance of the overall machine if not shut down properly.
3. Small thing. The power adaptor is white. This will get dirty and look untidy quickly
4. Accessories, while of high quality are expensive, and there are not as many options as you would find for PC, obviously
5. Its going to take you awhile to learn you way around the Mac OS. The logic is different but not impossible. After you a few days you realize it is actually a lot easier and better and makes Windows, dare I say it look a bit clunky.
6. Entourage and Office for Mac are not industrial grade. If you are used to large spreadsheets and documents and heavy Outlook usage then Office for Mac and Entourage will seem a little basic. The Apple guys will tell you it will do everything except Macros which is sort of true. I have found large Excel, Powerpoint and Word files with complex formulas or other inclusions will crash or open as Read Only. Also take a long time to open, even on a more powerful machine. If you are used to Office 2008 and rely on it, you may be disappointed with Office for Mac and Entourage. There are also little bits of functionality, that are either well hidden of not easy to find, like dragging margins when printing, requesting read/ receipts for email and so on.

Read more…

Business online Mac, Mac Book pro, PC, Windows