Included at the bottom of this post is a special discount offer code. More information…

I am asked all the time questions like ;

"How can we get more visitors from search engines like Google™?"

To which I normally exhale and say my normal response of;

"Well, it depends on why you want more visitors! I guess you're really asking for more buyers from Google™ aren't you?"

Most of the time, the person asking the question looks at me kind of funny and says, "I thought you are an Internet Marketing guy, not a shrink!" I guess I have to expect such reactions when answering a question with a question!

Anyhow, there isn't a single, simple answer to the question, because it is about the purpose and function of the online material. Ok, hold the phone, what the hell is Online Material? Well, this can be a commercial website, blog, Facebook page/group, Twitter page, Linked-In profile, YouTube video etc, etc. So for the purposes of this post, let's just call it a website or blog.

So now we want to look at the words "more visitors" a little closer. If you sell Fridge Freezers and other kitchen white goods, I'm guessing having 100% more visitors from the student demographic is not really what you're looking for! What you want are more relevant visitors. So you really want people who are in your marketplace and interested in what you have to sell or discuss.

Funnily enough, this is exactly what search engines like Google™ want to do also! So your both singing from the same hymn sheet, your ships are sailing in the same direction, you're both speaking the same language! Google™ wants to send relevant visitors to you, and you want more relevant visitors. A match made in heaven!

However, communication with Google™ is a little different to explaining something to a customer in person or online. After all, Google™ is software at the end of the day, very smart software, but its computer code and doesn't interpret nuances or inflection in speech or the written word. It certainly doesn't understand images or cool looking animations and definitely doesn't get catchy or friendly titles.

If you are looking for a quick win, e.g. sales straight away, you should be looking in the arena of Pay-Per-Click or affiliate marketing. Having said this, promoting your website and/or blog through the natural organic listings in search engines (the free ones), is and should be the ultimate goal of any and every website owner.

In order to improve your position in the natural listings you need to play the game with Google™ and communicate effectively with it. At the same time, you mustn't forget your real target audience is still human, they want and need to be able to find the information quickly, they also don't want to crawl through pages and pages of text, just to get to the point. Hmmm, maybe I should shorten this post!

So, a few points to consider are below, but if you want more in-depth knowledge and understanding why not take advantage of our 10% discount promotional code available on our Understanding Search Engines DVD. The discount code makes it a steal at just over £35.00 including worldwide shipping. Users of the DVD have found that they received 30% more visitors from Google™ after using the training DVD! More information…

Things to look at and think about on your website;

• Webpage copy includes the keywords people are using in search engines regularly. (Finding the best keywords to use is discussed & demonstrated on the DVD)
• Each webpage has unique meta page titles and descriptions, uses well structured images, links & headings (The DVD explains this fully)
• Each webpage has a unique and specific purpose. If this is not possible each separate section of the webpage is clearly broken up with headings indicating the purpose and information found underneath. (Examples of this are provided for on the DVD)
• You publish your website or blog to search engines regularly through Xml Sitemaps and other publication methods such as directories & postings. (Examples of search engine publishing is both discussed and demonstrated on the DVD)
• You seek out related and relevant websites and blogs to create link partnerships with, in order to make your webpages popular in search engines eyes. (The DVD demonstrates the process of finding possible link partners and also discusses contact and communication strategies)

The list goes on! So if you are looking to improve your position and visibility in the natural listings of search engines, start by using the Understanding Search Engines DVD as a kick start.

Have you ever added a comment on somebody's blog, just to find it removed or never pass the authors screening?

Most bloggers want to see comments on their posts, but they want to see related ones. We spend a while each day clearing the deluge of bogus and automated comments in a hope, an almost desperate hope, that one may be serious.

The fact is many Internet Marketers see blogs as being a quick and easy way of growing links to there own blogs and websites. However, most blogs instruct search engines not to follow comment links (see our post on no-follow mechanics). So they are, to a certain extent, wasting their time.

Having said this, adding related and relevant comments helps you build rapport with the author and over time you may be able to leverage the relationship to your advantage. Perhaps the blogger may post some information about you or your company, they may consider you when carrying out other day-to-day business activity. You can look at the comments section of a blog as an opportunity to network.   

So here are some guidelines;

1. Always read the article first!
2. Always read the article first! (No, this is not a mistake, we want to be sure you get what we're saying here.)
3. OK, now that you have read the article, think about what interested you about it and make some notes. Did you agree or disagree with the post? Do you have any thoughts that may extend or improve the information within the post?
4. Now write a sentence or short paragraph about your thoughts. Don't just compliment the author on how great she is, that's just annoying!
5. Use your name in your comment, not your company name or the keywords you want to be known for. This is a sure fore way of getting your comments deleted really quickly.
6. Always use your real email address. Most blogs don’t publish your email address, and using free Gmail and Hotmail email addresses is sure to make the author think very carefully about keeping your post active or not.

Learning computer skills is a gradual process. It can often take an individual a few repeated attempts to make tasks second nature.

Traditionally businesses would send their staff on day courses to learn the skills they need, however, most of the time the people being taught only need to learn the things they either struggle with or need to know for the job. It's therefore, often, a waste of time and money as the learner has to sit through a significant portion of training material they are already aware of or have no need to know.

It would be better if training could be done in a similar way to a doctor diagnosing and treating a patient. Targeting the gaps in people’s knowledge and filling them, is proving the most efficient way to keep your workforce up to speed and productive at the lowest cost possible.

Shelley Fishel, managing director, of The Training Surgery has developed just the medication businesses of all sizes require. Typical sessions are one-to-one or in pairs and rather than having a rigid format, the trainer concentrates on the areas the learner(s) needs help with. The outcome is less time training, therefore reducing cost but with massive increases in productivity.

Training can be done on all Microsoft Office products, on PC's or MAC's. Of course all the training can be delivered as a standard full or half day course too.

Organisations that have worked with The Training Surgery find their staff productivity increases by an average of 2.5 hours per person per week, a significant saving of time that can be better spent on brining in more clients or generating more sales.

Social media is everywhere you look. Not just online but in the papers, yes even the broadsheets, television, radio and mobile phones, it's just everywhere!

The question is how are large national and international businesses engaging in this arena and how are they managing the communication?

Well, there are a few methods, dispersed services and applications available such as KickApps, Sparta, Small World Labs, but move over KickApps, Comment Technologies truly Kicks Ass!

So Comment Technologies is the new kid on the block, but rather than just being a platform, it's a social marketing one stop service.

All of the other platforms are just that, platforms! They are something you need to learn, adapt and manage. This means slow lead times to launch, increased workforce and a very steep executive management learning curve.

Comment removes all of these adoption issues by providing a full end to end service of implementation, data migration and management. Meaning that any company can have there social media solution in place extremely quickly without resource constraints. Furthermore, while executive management and marketing departments are getting up to speed community engagement, growth and moderation can all be managed by the full range of Comment Technologies services.

However, it doesn't stop there! Where other platforms either focus on just building communities and/or selling advertising space, Comment provides a cutting edge back end reporting and analysis service comparable to best of breed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

So you want to target a new product launch in the central states of North America, focusing on married women aged 20 to 35, no problem. The information is available at a touch of a button.

Along with such powerful reporting and export features comes enterprise quality slice and dice import facilities. Got your customers in SAP or JDE? Hey no problem, import and synchronisation are a breeze.       

We feel the real value of Comment is not just its top grade, financial services quality, infrastructure but the services that can be bolted on to enable the business to adopt quickly and integrate into its day to day activity gradually.

If you are looking at social media as a marketing strategy and would like to know more, feel free to fire us over an email or connect with us on Linked-In, Twitter or Facebook.

You may have started to find that people you follow on Twitter are appending the hash-tags #in or #li to their tweets.

Basically, what has happened is, Linked-In (www.linkedin.com) has started integration with Twitter allowing its members to make their Twitter feed available to their Linked-In profiles.

Unlike many similar integrations, Linked-In allows you to select all Tweets to display or just the ones with the #in hash-tag appended.

A word of warning, Linked-In say that you can append #in or #li in their newsletter, but in the settings it only mentions #in, so if you want to feed your tweets into Linked-In be safe and stick with #in.

As an example, I just tweeted the following post. You can then see it displayed in our Linked-In status without any copy/paste or other nonsense. Very cool!
Don’t forget, appending the #in hash-tag to your Tweets will save you time as you don’t have to post the same status to Linked-In also.

Feel free to connect with me on Linked-In at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/fasttrackit

So you have created your marketing video and now want to promote it, well, everywhere!

YouTube is an obvious start, perhaps Bebo and the countless other video hosting websites and networks around. Eventually you’ll also add your video to Facebook, but in our view, Facebook should be the first place you go.

Facebook has a powerful tagging feature which allows you to associate your video post with your friends names. When you do this, your video will become visible to those peoples friends also. This means more exposure to people you don’t even know!

However, you can only tag friends of yours, in other words people whom have agreed to share their information with you.

So if video marketing is something your thinking about, try to do the following first;

1. Look for friends that are in a similar profession to you and mix in the circles of your target audience
2. Check out how many friends they have, you’re looking for people whom are active on Facebook and have upwards of 500 friends. 500 friends equates to approximate exposure of around 1,500 other people. This is calculated assuming a minimum of 3 unique friends per connection. (Drop me a comment if you want me to expand on this.)
3. Request to become friends with them, if you don’t know them, you may want to find out something about them first which you can use as an introduction. For example, see if they are on Twitter, mention them in a tweet, follow them there and then send a Facebook friendship request saying that you liked their Twitter page. Compliments get you everywhere!

Now in the production of your video, try to find a way of incorporating these people into the video in some way. If you find it tough, don’t stress, that’s what the credits at the end of the movie are for, simply add a list titled “Thanks to;” to the end of the video.

Don’t abuse it! If someone feels like you are piggybacking too much they may well kick up a stick with Facebook and you could get yourself cut off. Think carefully and strategically, and this system will work well for you.

With the launch in December of our new email marketing platform we thought we would write a few of our thoughts on email marketing.

We start this series with perhaps a surprising statement. "You don't have to use an email marketing solution to be effective with your emails!"

Every time you send an email throughout the day, you have the opportunity to spread your message. Apart from ensuring you write your email well, you should also consider your email signature.

Remember Your Telephone Number

I hate receiving emails from people when they don't provide at least a telephone number under their name, even if I know the person. If I want to respond by phone I now have to dig around and look for their number. So always ensure your signature includes your telephone number, next you should ensure your web address is visible and is a link which can be clicked. Don't worry about including your email address, that's what the reply buttons for.

See an example of a poor signature below. Michael is suggesting I call if I have any questions, but doesn’t provide a telephone number.

Promote Your News

However, as well as your contact details you can become a little more interactive and suggestive with your signature. For example, if you write a blog or have a RSS newsfeed on your website, you can very easily add what’s called a headline animator to your email signature. Below is an example of our headline animator created using Feedburner. You can find out more about burning your blog/RSS feed and creating a headline animator with Feedburner at http://feedburner.google.com.

Get more followers

If you use social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, you may also want to think about adding links to your pages. This can encourage more followers/fans.

Below is an example of our signature, notice that just above my name I include what I call an encouraging message. This can, and should, be changed periodically and can discuss new product launches, project performance etc.

Last week we launched our new Internet Marketing Affiliate scheme. The program provides Internet & Marketing professional a way of increasing revenue without additional cost or risks. It also provides business people with connections to these groups of companies and professionals with a way of earning revenue through a multi-tiered payments. We have created a short video which describes the scheme and an example of the payment tiers.

With so many different ways to market our companies, services and products online nowadays it's often difficult to know which we should spend the most time on.

It would be nice if we had a framework, a guiding tool, to help us decide which way is best.

A very easy way to start to define your online marketing strategy is to follow our framework guidelines. We call this the Internet Marketing Landscape and at this stage it covers content only. i.e it does not cover advertising such as pay-per-click, banners or search marketing such as SEO etc.

The landscape starts with 4 main dimensions;

1. Conversations
2. Profiles
3. Sales
4. Support

You can think of these dimensions as quadrants of the bigger picture. Our aim is to slot our online marketing activities into 1 or more of these, the more dimensions they hit, the more valuable they are.

Let's take a commercial website as an example. This is certainly part of the sales dimension but it's only a one way communication channel so it doesn't sit in support or conversions, just sales and profile. How about our linked-in account? Well this sits in profile and possibly, a little bit, in conversations but not support or sales.

Our blog crosses all dimensions, it has the ability to sell, support, encourage conversations through comments and also provide profile information. In actual fact blogs, if used well, are one of the strongest components of the landscape. What about Twitter? Well again it's a great conversation platform, it can also be used for support but we aren't using it for this.

Most businesses will use many different online strategies and systems, some may use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and others won't use any of these. The ways in which these systems are used are also quite different so it's important that you map your own businesses onto the landscape.

Once you're done, you should look for the items which cross the most dimensions. In our example above, our blog is the strongest. So we should look to publish content to it as frequently as possible, next is our website, so again we should look at updating the content on our website on a regular basis.

However, this is not to say that you should neglect things like eBay or Amazon, which produce sales. The landscape is more about allocation of resource for updates, so that you can divide your online marketing time and budget accordingly.

It seams like everywhere you look online nowadays, all you find are widgets!

So you may well ask "What the hell's a widget?"

Above is dictionary.com interpretation of the word, but in the realm of social media its idea is, well, anything really! Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and Google all provide widgets of one sort or another.

Most of the time a widget is a small component of a web page. It's a piece of code developed by one company/website which is then run on many other websites in a hope to allow visitors to connect easier. For example, on our blog you’ll find 2 widgets we are using, one of them is a Twitter re-tweet button and the other is a Facebook share button.

These work in much the same way as most social media widgets work, they are small HTML & Javascript snippets of code your web designer can simply drop onto your pages and off you go. You're using a widget!

However, the plethora of widgets available just seams to be a little overwhelming and in many cases completely useless and unnecessary. I can imagine in many companies trying to tap into the social media market, the directors sit around a table together with the designers and developers and they say "We have to make it different and stand out in the crowd, any ideas?" to which some bright spark says, "I know, lets create a widget!"

I may sound a little negative here, but I’m trying not to be, honest. Just create widgets with purpose! So I have listed a few of our favourites below, please feel free to comment and let us know yours also.

Re-Tweet Button: http://tweetmeme.com
Facebook Share: http://facebook.com & http://www.fbshare.me
Social Networking Components by Google Friends Connect http://www.google.com/friendconnect
RSS & ATOM Feeds: http://feedburner.google.com
Gravatars (Used in blog comments etc.) http://en.gravatar.com