Archive for how to

Rule #1 for retaining your credibility in business…

Jan 31 | by Sam Deeks | Big Marketing Mistakes, GRRRR!!!, how to
1 Comment

At least be good at what you’re supposed to be good at! :-)

I’ve lost count of the number of ‘web design / internet marketing’ agency sites I’ve visited only to be astonished to find that they seem to have overlooked the absolute basics of search engine optimisation.

Let’s get something clear here: we’re not talking about clever, complicated nerdy stuff.  We’re talking about the absolute basics you need to be doing if you’re to stand even the slightest chance of being found in Google by your prospects.

How can you tell a when a web design company won’t give you that?  Well, you don’t have to be an expert. It’s easy to spot when you know what you’re looking for and it’s a fun, if slightly depressing, game you can play right here and right now from the comfort of your own browser.

Here are the rules:

  1. Go find a web design / internet marketing company online
  2. Look at the page titles that appear at the top of your browser window when you click on different parts of their site.  Do they have the same title on every page? What are the keywords? Does it look like they will help their services get found by their prospects using Google? (Hint: things like “MyCompanyName: Our portfolio” are practically useless)

You’ll be amazed – and eventually bloody annoyed.  I only wish more people played this game before they went ahead and contracted someone to develop their website.  All too often people end up playing this game after – when it’s too late.

Here’s one I found today.  Click on the thumbnail (above right) to zoom in.

“We design online strategy and build software” says the title on every page.  Absolutely useless as far as Google is concerned – except in the highly unlikely (frankly bizarre) eventuality that someone out there types the exact words “we design online strategy and build software” into Google in the hope of finding a web designer in their area.

Rather depressingly, this company has also broken Rule # 2 which is if you’re going to showcase something, at least showcase someting YOU’VE made, not someone else – doh!?!)

If you’ve already paid for a website that Google can’t find because the page titles are all something like “We design online strategy and build software” or “Pickled Onion Designs: My portfolio” then all I can say is I hope you won’t make that mistake again.  Basic SEO is an elementary part of a basic site – not some exotic luxury!

If on the other hand, you’re still looking around for a company to make your site I hope you’ll play this little game before you hand over your hard-earned money.

Online reputation management: do it yourself

Jan 13 | by Sam Deeks | ORM, business insight, how to
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You don’t need sophisticated or expensive packages to monitor and manage your online reputation

It’s not rocket science – you just need the tools that your prospects have got (i.e. Google); the ability to think like them, a dose of humility and a crash course in not being reactive.

Oh, and you need to know there’s a difference between monitoring and managing your reputation.

Online reputation monitoring

The simplest advice for monitoring your online reputation is to start with the FASTEST (and therefore potentially most damaging) channels out there:

1) Set up Google alerts for your name, your company name and products and brands.  Sit back and let Google bring the good – and bad – news to you whenever it hears you being mentioned online.

2) While you’re waiting for Google Alerts to bring you news, go to Twitter and search for your name, your company name and your brands.  It’s the most ‘real-time’ network / source of content there is.  If people are going to rant at the point of dissatisfaction, they’re going to do it via their mobile, and they’re probably going to do it on Twitter.

3) If that’s all clear, next do a search in Google.  Do a broad web search first.  See what comes up in the first couple of pages of Google.  Hopefully, a lot of it will be your web site pages and things you’ve done to market and promote yourself and your products.  If not, sack your web designer :-)

Remember: people use blog posts and forum posts to vent their anger or dissatisfaction. Learn to recognise how these posts and comments appear in the regular web results.

4) To focus entirely on blog content, do a dedicated Google blog search

5) Most of all, learn to think like a customer – an angry one and a prospective one.  When an unhappy customer wants to nail you for not listening,  they’re going to nail you by telling their trusted network how bad you are and follow up by publishing posts and comments online with words like rip-off’ ’scam’ and ‘fraud’ to the end.  They want their experience of you to be found by others researching your company – and now they have the tools to do it within minutes.  Be warned; this stuff can kill your business in a matter of days.

When a prospective customer wants to find out the truth about your company, ‘XYZ consultants’, they’re going to start by searching for ‘XYZ consultants’.  Then they’re going to add the words ’scam’, ‘feedback’, ‘rip-off’, ‘review’ at the end to see what comes up.

To manage your online reputation online successfully, you need to see these words as a code that customers and prospects use to bypass your own (naturally positive) propaganda.  So learn the code – and make sure YOU search the web regularly for these coded references to you and your company.

You wouldn’t believe how many companies’ reputations are in tatters online and yet they don’t even know about it.  It could explain that gradual drop-off in sales they’ve been seeing…

Online reputation management

Managing your online reputation priorities are as follows (listed in order of the amount of your energy you should expend on them):

1) Create the best products and services you can.  This is bleedin’ obvious, but the best way to create and protect a great on- and offline reputation is to do the basics really, really well.

2) When things go wrong, do everything you can to make your customer happy.  That means invite feedback, listen without being defensive, go out of your way to satisfy them

3) When you don’t do 1) and 2) properly, people will punish you online by Tweeting, blogging, forum posting and commenting anywhere and everywhere they can.  Count on it. When you finally find something angry / hostile / nasty (true or untrue) with your online monitoring (see the list above), the first thing you need to do is NOTHING.

4) While you’re doing NOTHING (i.e. not reacting, not getting into a fight to try to defend yourself), you should be getting really honest with yourself about what it is you might have done to create the situation.

5) Then you should be thinking about what you can do to put it right.  What you can do, and what you are willing to do.

6) Then consider approaching the disgruntled punter publicly (in whatever forum or blog his/her comment appears) and a) apologise for not having met their expectations b) apologise if you didn’t listen or respond to their original feedback or complaint.  Listen, I promise you, no matter how bad this makes you feel, you almost certainly didn’t listen the first time round.  If you can do this from a genuine place – i.e. that you really do care about helping this person to feel better about your company, you’ll be amazed what you can achieve.

7) If you’ve reacted dived in with both feet and made things worse, then call us to take the heat out of the situation on 01822 610841.

8 ) Start to create positive online content about you, your company and your brands to balance, and ultimately outweight the negative.  Beware: this only works when that content is genuine and credible.

Paying offshore SEO or Reputation Management Companies to flood Google with superficial stuff about you is a false economy (an expensive one at that!) – it will be transparent to any half-wit looking to find out what a company is really like.

If you want to do it properly, call us on 01822 610841.

Blogging for money… well, kind of

Nov 30 | by Sam Deeks | blogging technique, how to
2 Comments

Want to make money from blogging?  Here’s how it worked for me

Look, before we go any further, I’ll tell you the truth about how much I’ve earned so far.

Are you ready?  £15. Yes! £15 that could just as easily be yours!!!  That (as far as I’m concerned, friend) makes me a pro.  Which, in turn, qualifies me to tell YOU how do it, right?  And think yourself lucky I’m not trying to sell you my eBook ‘How to make more than £14 with my £15-Google-system‘ for $47! :-)
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Joking aside, it’s fun to see my grand earnings total rising inexorably day on day. And I’m not even trying, really I’m not.

So here’s the ‘mu:kaumedia guide to making easy money like what I do:

1) Set up a Wordpress blog

2) Blog regularly about an area you’re interested in and (most importantly) that will interest other people

3) Make sure your basic post SEO is good (keywords in titles, headers and content)

4) Anticipate what people will be searching for in your area of interest and blog about it before they start searching

5) Sign up to Google adsense and splash a small block of ads on your site in a non-intrusive position

So how exactly did I make my Google fortune?

SpotfyBlog2

Way back in Jan 2009, someone invited me to the new, ‘invitation-only’ music streaming service Spotify.  It didn’t take a genius to work out that something as groundbreaking as Spotify + invitation-only membership was going to lead to a pile of people looking for invitations.

I then wrote a couple of quick blog posts with titles like, er.. “How do I get a Spotify invitation?” and some useful links (plus offer to give away the invites I got when I signed up).

Result?  Lots of visitors to give those invites to.  Followed by Spotify dumping about 600 more invitations on me to give away for them.  Followed by lots more people looking… followed by people placing links to my post in various forums and sites.

Eventually, I ran out of posts but that didn’t stop the people coming.  In the end, I posted a link to a page that, oddly enough, by-passes Spotify’s invite page altogether (I still can’t work out why they left it open??).  And still the people come at the rate of 1000+ a day.  And most of them go away happy.

After 8 months of traffic, I decided to sell my soul to Satan and put some ads on my site.  Result?  Vast sums of Adsense revenue.

So if I can do it, so can you.  Why, if I had me 10 blogs running… and I was actually doing it seriously, who knows how much money could be made each month?  £150? More, if I had no qualms about the nature or quality of my content or affiliate marketing scheme…or…or.. the mind boggles.  The only thing I didn’t do was put the ads on earlier. Heck, I might be blogging this from my yacht in the Caribbean if I hadn’t wasted those 8 months of traffic.

Using a Wiki for business: too much like hard work

Sep 30 | by Sam Deeks | business insight, how to
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Is your business Wiki hard work?  Could it be a solution without a problem?

We all know what Wikis are, right?  They’re web pages that everyone can edit with the result that no one person ‘owns’ what’s written.  It’s the embodiment of the self-managing, self-leveling, self-policing ‘wisdom of the crowd’.  A democratic body of knowledge owned by everyone.

We all know a Wiki, right?  Err…yes! Wikipedia.  It’s that big online encyclopedia that anyone can add to or change – you know that thing that’s always right up there at the top of all Google searches for practically anything.

The thing about Wikis is that they sound like such a good idea in theory.  The software’s free; you’re already using the computer anyway… all you have to do is find a problem to point a Wiki at.

This is what Common Craft had to say about Wikis in 2007:

It all makes sense.  Firstly there’s a clear problem: ‘how do we keep track of what we need and who’s bringing what?’

Secondly there’s a tangible pay-off to motivate people to engage with it: ‘if we do this we’ll end up with all the right gear and have a great camping trip’.

Someone called me this week to discuss the merits of using a Wiki to ‘liven up a business’s Intranet’ and – more tellingly – to download the intellectual property of its employees.  My advice would be that if you have a clear problem that a Wiki can solve with a tangible pay-off for those involved in creating and using it, then go for it.  If, on the other hand, it’s just a nice-sounding idea about creating a shared pool of knowledge or worse, the desire to squeeze people for their knowledge so they don’t take it away when they leave, then it may well turn out to be a mistake.

If you’re going to use a Wiki for business, make sure that it solves an obvious problem and that the people you want to use it get a payoff for the time and effort required to create and input the stuff that has to go into it.

There is another option.  Just the tools in place and just see what happens  – like Wikipedia itself.  In a most un-businesslike fashion, you’ll need to let go of any attachment to the outcome.

And if nothing happens, it’s worth bearing in mind that Wikipedia itself is the product of several hundreds of millions of internet users.

Spotify invitations: I wish I could help…

Sep 18 | by Sam Deeks | Benefits of blogging, how to
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Sorry not to be able to help with Spotify invitations any more

Since the Spotify iPhone app was released there’s been a surge in traffic here looking for Spotify invitations.  Back in January, I played a small part in Spotify’s online marketing strategy – by helping spread the word about the free service and giving out invites.

It was nice to be able to create 600+ accounts for happy people at the time but Spotify’s strategy has moved on, so I’m not able to help any more.

For those of you interested in the way blogging can create traffic to your site, the recent surge in visitors to my site (see stats below) coincides with Spotify’s release of the iPhone app and their return to ‘invite-only’ free membership.  That traffic is the result of one or two carefully-worded and well-timed posts in January 2009.

Picture 3

Installing a vodafone dongle on your mac?

Sep 8 | by Sam Deeks | feedback, how to
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Tips for installing Vodafone’s USB Modem stick on your MacBook Pro

vodafone-usb-modem-lite-h11) Make sure that Vodafone have assigned numbers to your sims.  Didn’t happen for us.  It took an hour of 0870 phone calling to get that part sorted.

2) Use installer disk to install Vodafone Mobile Connect software (put icon on your dock)

3) Use this software to ‘connect’ to internet with your dongle

4) Try running browser…ah.  Not connected to internet.

5) Go to Network in your system preferences

6) Choose ‘Vodafone 3520′

7) In ‘Telephone number’ box, overwrite what’s there (in my case it was something like “*/***99*#”) replacing it with “*99#’.  Account name is ‘web’, password is ‘web’

8) Click connect and it should work

So how come this installer disk placed the wrong phone number in my preferences?? Another half an hour on the line to (very helpful) technical support lady at Vodafone confirmed what I suspected: that Vodafone really haven’t been that bothered about supporting Mac users.

Or giving them any readable instructions either.  Which is a pity because it then falls to people like me (and other bloggers) to fill in the information vaccuum.  Oh, and if you’re trying to do it with Snow Leopard, you’ll have even more trouble. ;-)

Yet another guide to Twitter for business… yawn.

Aug 3 | by Sam Deeks | how to, online networking
No Comments

Oh, my.. God.  Everyone’s doing it.  Writing guides to Twitter, I mean. So here’s mine.

Twitter is a way to publish / broadcast little chunks of information (140 characters).  That can be text, links to interesting things or repeating things other people have said.  This takes place within a global network.  You build up your network by following other people or being followed.  Often people follow the people who follow them.  Sometimes they don’t.

Everyone you follow or who follows you is part of your network and each person in your network has their own network.  You can explore all the people in the network of someone who is in your network.  Wherever you find interesting people you can view them and their tweets (their ‘feed’).  If you want, you can follow them.

When you follow someone, their tweets appear (along with those of everyone else you follow) in an overall ‘feed’ of tweets from everyone in your network.  When you’re following 20 people, that’s quite a few tweets a day.  When you’re following 10,000 people that’s a hell of a lot of tweets a day.

What’s the point?  Well, you can follow people who are particularly interesting in terms of your speciality of niche, for example.  How do you find them?  Maybe you already know them – in which case, you find out their Twitter name and follow them.  Maybe you find them because someone you’re already connected to in Twitter has them in their network.  Or, maybe you find them by searching all Twitter’s tweets for certain keywords.   If you search for ‘nasa’ you’ll get back a list of tweets mentioning ‘nasa’.  You can skim through all the people tweeting to decide who you think has something useful to offer you and follow accordingly.

Twitter makes it just as easy to find every time you’ve been mentioned (offering lots of potential for measuring the success of online marketing efforts).  It allows you to send private, direct messages to people that you follow and who are following you.

Once you’ve created a Twitter account, there are many ‘Twitter clients’ you can use to manage your Twitter communications whether via a browser, your iPhone, a blackberry or your laptop.

The beauty of Twitter is that it’s brief, almost instantaneous and global.  It is faster than the news networks meaning – increasingly – that it’s the place for breaking news.  And it’s currently free.

On the plus side, Twitter is the fastest global communication tool currently out there with all the power and searchability of the internet built in.  It’s what social media is really all about.  It’s so good that it will kill Facebook off within a couple of years.  Use it to offer people valuable information and links and you’ll go far.  Use it to feed your overblown ego, on the other hand, and you’ll find yourself on a fast-track to damaging your reputation in no time.

Do’s:

  • Do give away useful information (via links or by ‘re-tweeting’ things other people have given away)
  • Do ‘big up’ other people in your network and get introductions going
  • Do be a real person (not a cool nickname and avatar)
  • Search for people talking about the things you care about and follow them

Don’ts:

  • Don’t follow people just to build up your numbers
  • Don’t try to use Twitter to get rich quick
  • Don’t be indiscreet (personally or professionally)
  • Don’t post 100 tweets a day, it’s really boring

Make your blog work with the iPhone

Jun 7 | by Sam Deeks | blogging technique, how to, iPhone
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WPTouch plugin makes your blog readable by iPhone

If you’re a blogger, you might like WPTouch, the plugin for Wordpress that once activated, outputs a version of your blog in a format designed for iPhone users.

It’s brilliant! But how come I didn’t know about it before?

Well, I can think of st least two reasons, depressingly common in online media. First of all, there’s the dire and counter-intuitive interface of the Wordpress ‘Extend’ plugin repository. Try finding something there to solve a problem you might have. No chance unless you already know the name of the thing you need to solve the problem…in which case, you wouldn’t be bloody well looking for it, would you?

Then there’s a peculiar tendency of developers to give their plugins names that give no hint of what they might do in case they might help you solve your problem without sufficient frustration and suffering. I mean, ‘WPTouch’? Why not ‘ConvertWPtoiPhone’ for God’s sake?

If a friend hadn’t told me about it, I doubt if I would have found it at all. Mad – particularly since it opens your blog up to the entire world of iPhone users, especially via Twitter.

Its worth remembering that this mobile internet stuff is really still in its infancy. It’s taken me over 30 frustrating minutes to write this on my iPhone and I haven’t got the energy to try to work out how to copy and paste a link URL, but miracle of miracles, I’m doing it on train travelling at 125mph.

Mustn’t grumble, eh? :-)

Idiot’s guide to Wordpress 2.7

Apr 14 | by Sam Deeks | blogging technique, how to
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Thanks to Dave Coveney at Spectacula for this free idiot’s guide to WP 2.7

In my experience, open source software can suffer from a lack of sensible documentation.  Not surprising.  Would you want to spend day after day writing a big fat manual no-one’s going to pay you for?  Not bleedin’ likely.

Which makes Dave Coveney’s ‘Wordpress 2.7 User Guide’ something of a find.

It’s worth downloading this if you’re starting out using Wordpress – Dave’s tips will save you some headaches and a bit of time.

Those of us who have found out some of that stuff the hard way – we salute you!

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