The 5HITS
Internet Marketing and Digital Strategy Blog
Old Media Agencies
Sep 23rd
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.
Bruce Clay SEO Courses 1 Day
Aug 31st
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.
Converting from PC to MAC OSX
Aug 15th
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
- 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!
- 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.
- Small thing. The power adaptor is white. This will get dirty and look untidy quickly
- Accessories, while of high quality are expensive, and there are not as many options as you would find for PC, obviously
- 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.
- 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. More >
Flow Down Economy
Jul 11th
The global financial crisis means the economy will flow down. While things look bad there are opportunities out there, just not where you maybe looking. If you sell things that people really don’t need, then this may not be for you.
- While hair dressers might be doing it tough, sellers of hair treatments and dye are doing very well as more people do their hair at home to save money
- While weekend getaway hotels might be doing it tough, flower deliveries are up as people choose cheaper options to treat their loved ones
- While air travel is down, regional hotels are getting the business as people stay closer to home
- People are moving away from media advertising to search marketing due to the ROI and from paid toward more SEO based approaches. Social marketing is big, why do you think?
In every industry there is a flow down economy. Are you tapping into yours?
How is your GFC?
I meet a number of business owners, corporate managers and CEO’s and the first question usually how is business? In other words, we seem to be doing OK, are you guys doing OK? With all the bad news around, we are not sure if things are good or bad. On average I would sum up responses and the feeling toward the economy as such:
- So far we seem to be tracking OK, given the bad economic news
- We are not rushing out to hire and have not replaced certain people
- Revenues are in a range of 10% up to 10% down on prior year
Keep in mind these companies are generally still profitable and thus engaging my services or about to. I accept sometimes people are frugal with the truth. So if you are reading this and doing it tough I accept there are real issues out there in certain industries. If you look at the Classifind job index, that also tells part of the story.
Consider your business model?
1. Marketing & sales
- Have you reconsidered who your customer is, your customer profile?
- Have you considered whether your customer needs have changed? They may still be buying but for different reasons.
- Have you considered new customer markets on a needs basis, and how to reach these people?
- Are you still paying to market to the wrong target customers?
- Where is the current spend and are you tapping into it?
2. Customer service
- Where is your customer service dollar being spent, still on the upper end? Are you servicing customers who are no longer buying? More >
Ten things every CEO should know
Jun 30th
Reading George F Colony’s Blogcalled the Counterintuitive CEO on how what CEOs will face next with respect to the recession and how it will act a s a gateway connecting 2 different era’s got me thinking on the top things CEOs should be considering to get them through this gateway or portal with business intact.
- There is always opportunity. It just looks different, maybe now it is less abundant, but it is there. Opportunity + Planning = success. Testing ideas online is cheap.
- There is no such thing as an unprofitable business. Just unprofitable business models.
- Stay clean, squeaky clean. The digital trail never dies. Manage your life and your associated online reputation carefully.
- Invest in your digital properties and digital footprint. Proactively managing your online customer and future customer base is key. Make sure your selection processes for vendors and software are sound.
- Educate yourself on all things digital. Take a course. Invest some time. Understand search engine marketing (SEM) and especially search engine optimisation (SEO) and how it applies to your business. More >
Choice Grocery gets the can
Jun 28th
Competition minister Craig Emerson it appears has decided that competition is not such a great thing and out an end to the new Choice Grocery website, which was due to go live next week. Read the full article on News and The Australian, or maybe there is more to it and we the citizens are not considered sophisticated enough to understand why anything that will help manage duopolies and potentially keep prices down should be a good thing.
This was a well funded website, with good resources involved. The first effort is reported to have cost around $6m before being canned and the Choice Grocery, to date reported at $7m of the $13m. With 1 week to go before the site goes live, why would you cancel such project? The only possible reasons maybe:
- The supermarket lobbyists are a lot more convincing than we might think
- The supermarkets can bring a lot more pressure to Government that we might think
- Some powerful people out there really do not want any sort of spot light brought onto grocery prices
- The site was really really bad, $7m how bad can it be?
According to Livenews, they just come out and say it. Pressure from the big supermarkets is believed to have caused the Government to abandon their election promises and admit the site is not feasible. Seven million dollars later…
Choice was not told direct and Mr Emerson communicated the news after meeting with Grocery retailers. Hang on a second. if this is correct, he decided this was not feasible with the very people it is meant to manage and potentially cause to reduce their prices and profits. So the players decided the aims of the site which is being developed by an independent part, being the trusted consumer brand Choice, were not feasible. There just has to be something wrong with that picture, I cannot put my finger on it right now though.
Blind search engine comparison – Bing, Yahoo and Google
Jun 8th
This is interesting. Michael Kordahi, a Microsoft employee built the blind search engine I think to sell more Tweetshirts. The search engine comparisons exclude any blended search compnents such as News, Blogs etc.
Go check it out at http://blindsearch.fejus.com/
Free your mind
May 28th
So what does all this mean?
There is no time for complacency and innovation is essential. And you can get a powerful message across with an innovative approach, good design and Youtube.
New Bruce Clay SEO Blog in Australia
Apr 5th
Bruce Clay has just launched their Australian search engine optimisation (SEO) blog. You can catch all the latest SEO related news, updates and events on the new Bruce Clay blog. The new SEO blog was launched in line with SMX Sydney and you can catch all the action from all the sessions there now. The focus of the blog will be updates, information, research, events and interviews, all from an Australian perspective. The goal as we understand it is to become the leading SEO blog in Australia within 6 months.
Coming up on the blog are interviews with some of Australia’s leading in-house SEO’s who work and manage some of Australia’s largest websites. Also watch out for 1 day training from Bruce Clay based on the recent 1 day training done for SES New York and others. The first session will be in Tasmania in May 2009. You can now get the latest and best right here in Australia.
Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jeremybolt for all the latest blog updates and news.
And yes… the 5hits will continue.
Social Media Strategy and Marketing
Mar 28th
With Twitter going mainstream and the number of social media experts, strategists and consultants on the scene, I thought it was high time to interject with some thoughts, seen as everyone else is. If you read my previous post “Brands on the rise” this ties in closely. Getting your brand socialised will become increasingly important in the future, for Internet Marketing.
So what should you consider for your business from a social media strategy, other than the need to show a return and the potential difficulty in measuring a return, be it financial or otherwise?
Also, while many agencies use social media as another channel for creative ideas to generate brand awareness or sales, this is not about campaigns using social media as a channel. This is about companies engaging with social media in a well thought out strategy. Setting up processes with the objective of increasing brand awareness and sales through ongoing relevant and value adding interaction with customers and potential customers. If you do have a campaign, you would these social media processes to deliver on the campaign and own them, not let your agencies own them.
Key activities to include in your social media strategy include:
- Social media policies
- Social media audit
- Social media strategy
- Social media operationalisation and ongoing monitoring
1. Social Media Policies
Have you got any guidelines, advice, communication for staff as to how they may or may not interact with online media while on company time, through the company network or as an ambassador of your brand. If you have people in your workforce under 55 years old, in fact if you have people in your workforce, trust me they are engaged somewhere, be it LinkedIN, FaceBook, FlickR or Twitter.
Do you have formal advice for them on:
- Whether they can represent the brand, e.g. commenting on an industry issue n a blog as a member of your company
- Whether they can mention customers, e.g Twittering about a new pitch or a customer experience
- What internal information can be discussed, e.g. Blogging about staff cuts
- Privacy e.g. including pictures from the office party of drunken colleagues in fancy dress in their public FlickR account More >