Jakob Nielsen has turned his attention to some specific usability elements in blogs which are certainly different to those that we have come to accept when creating websites. His article outlines what he considers to be the Top Ten Design mistakes that he sees bloggers making.

Although Nielsen’s stated focus is on usability and on blogs in general, if we apply these elements to business blogs then many still remain very relevant, particularly where individual professionals or small and medium sized businesses are concerned.

1. No Author Biographies
As a small and medium sized business, one aim of your blog in terms of marketing you and your business, is to help develop a level of trust with your target audience and to demonstrate your expertise to your readers. A short biography will help substantiate this and fill in some of the details about the person. Don’t forget to put contact details there as well! You also need to make sure it’s easy for people to get in touch!

2. No Author Photo
A photo can contribute to developing that personal touch which should help to show the people behind the company face. In professional services, such as law firms or accountancies, a photo on a website can help develop a sense of trust and the same is true here. Make sure the photo portrays you in the light you would like to be seen, though!

3. Nondescript posting titles
Apart from being clear about what you are blogging about, the title is absolutely key to the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) elements within the blog. A good title should not only be a clear indicator to the reader of what the post contains but should also contain the keywords of the article to help with Search Engines.

4. Links don’t say where they go
Being able to easily find your way around a site or to other sites is fundamental to working closely with your readers and getting them to return, so make sure you “signpost” links as clearly as possible. Additionally, from an SEO standpoint again, the text you use to create the link (so called ‘anchor text’) is very valuable so use it!

5. Classic hits are buried
If there are certain key articles which any visitor to your site must read, then make sure that you highlight it on your blog. Key articles really show what you and your company are all about so make sure everyone has the opportunity to read these gems!

6. Calendar is the only navigation
Generally, when new people visit your blog, they are going to want to read your posts on certain subjects to get to understand what the focus of your blog is all about. So make sure that your categories are well named so that people can find for what they are looking for quickly and easily - then they’ll come back for more!

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
Although publishing when you have something to say is good, regular posting is certainly beneficial so that people can know when to come back to view your updates. Of course, doing this through RSS would save them time and effort!

8. Mixing Topics
In a business blog, if you are able to keep to your specific area of expertise (your niche if you like) then this will help in your marketing efforts to position yourself as an expert in that subject area through the information that you are providing in your blog.

9. Forgetting that you write for your future boss
In the instance of a small business, you are in fact writing for your customers, present and future! Nevertheless, be very clear that anything you write can be found by them and so only write posts that you are representative of yourself and your business, as you are writing not only to them but to the world at large.

10. Having a domain name owned by a weblog service
Having control yourself of all aspects of your business is important– and a blog, with its strong marketing and PR benefits, must certainly be one of those. Therefore use a blogging system that you are able to adapt to your needs through a domain that you own.

Overall, definitely a lot of relevance there to business blogging, including a number of key elements that you should consider right from the planning stage of your blog where possible. So making sure that you consider that you will need to deal with both your readers and the Search Engines from the outset is certainly good advice.

All too often, being a UK marketing consultant means that you are battling against a number of issues from a number of different areas, even within the UK marketing profession. You can come across marketing managers in UK companies who have opposing views on how to best use marketing in a business development context and others who consider UK marketing consultants to be all theory and no action! What a distorted view of UK marketing!

Marketing consultants in the UK also have to deal with the very different opinions from their marketing consultant counterparts in the US who believe UK consultants to be less direct than they should be, both in promoting their own marketing consultancies as well as their ideas. Additionally, as a marketing consultant in the UK, it is important to be able to offer not only consultancy in all aspects of traditional marketing but also be able to offer UK companies a focused vision on online marketing and how best to integrate it with their other offline UK marketing activities.

This area of online marketing, or eMarketing, encompasses much more than just internet marketing and more than just website promotion, although it does include both of those. So while internet marketing will tend to include Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Advertising (or Pay Per Click), Link Development, Banner advertising etc., emarketing takes the reach a step further. Emarketing extends to cover all methods of communicating with your customers electronically, not just through the internet but also through email marketing, business blogging, mobile messaging, podcasting and the like. A UK marketing consultant should be au fait with all of these techniques and online marketing methods.

Indeed any UK marketing consultant worth his/her salt should be able to consult on, advise and implement not only traditional UK marketing activities but also have the scope to look at using the full range of emarketing techniques to complement these. A marketing consultant should also be clear from the outset that they are not just there to deal with UK marketing theory but UK marketing practice as well. With this we may be able to enhance the reputation of UK marketing consultants as a whole and demonstrate UK marketing at its best rather than try to drag it kicking and screaming into the 21st Century!

Once a well designed website is in place (together with a plan for its management and updating), attention can then be turned to the online promotion of the business and the creation of an increasing flow of visitors and potential customers to the website.

The range of emarketing methods at your disposal to achieve this share five critical factors. It is these factors which make emarketing particularly attractive and so successful for those companies using it. The principal ones are:

• Highly Targeted: the digital nature of the internet allows you to offer specific and customised content to each individual. As a result, it allows you to attract highly targeted customers to your website who are most likely to be interested in your products and services;
• Easily Measurable: knowing how many people are visiting your website, how they found you and what they looked at are invaluable elements to gaining a better understanding of your customers and being able to supply what they require. Emarketing allows you to obtain full tracking figures and will permits a detailed examination of the Return on Investment (ROI) of any campaign;
• Immediate: time is crucial in business and an emarketing campaign has the advantage of being much quicker to set up and put into play than other marketing methods. Just as importantly, the response mechanisms are equally quick so you can start to see the results (quite literally) immediately;
• Tested and Refined: although the immediacy and speed of a campaign is important, the quality needs to be just as high. To ensure it remains so, you have the opportunity to test and refine any campaign as it is happening to ensure you get the best possible results. By adopting the content and format which is achieving the highest response rates, you can continually improve your results and number of visitors.
• Cost effective: with budgets tight, all of the elements above mean that companies needing clear ROI figures from their marketing activity will be well served by an integrated emarketing campaign. Being able to react quickly and in a very targeted way also means that they can avoid delays and the costs associated with them.

This combination of benefits produces fast acting, flexible yet focused marketing campaigns which can be measured and refined on an ongoing basis. When budgets are small, as is normally the case with small and medium sized businesses, then this is all important to make sure that you squeeze every last drop of value out of what is available!

Good to see an article on Internet News.com which indicates that Corporate Blogging takes off according to a survey which has been carried out recently. A lot of the comments that were made related to larger corporates but are just as relevant to smaller companies and business professionals as well.

The elements regarding how business blogs are being used shows that they are being employed for public relations and marketing, as well as to demonstrate thought leadership in their chosen area. It was good to see that as well as hoping to achieve improved brand recognition and external communications, blogs were also seen as a excellent vehicle for customer feedback. This last point is key again in companies of all sizes wishing to develop better relationships with their customer base.

Recently, Google has launched its Blog Search Engine which works in the same basic way as the normal Google Search Engine that we are all so familiar with, except that it only indexes blogs.

If a blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service, then Google’s Blog Search Engine should be able to find it and certainly so far it seems to be doing a good job in that respect. An added feature, particularly relevant to blogs, is that it allows you to sort the results not only by relevance, but also by date.

However, this is not to discuss its relative merits but rather to highlight some of the special search operators that it has over and above those that we already have available from the main Google Search Engine – a list of these main operators can be found on Google’s site.

In addition to these, Blog Search supports the following new operators of its own:

inblogtitle:
Every blog has its own title as part of its set-up and this is what is searched through to return results. This does not refer to all that is in the “Title tag” which will vary according to the page or all that is included in the URL.

inposttitle:
This searches through the titles of the posts which are made in a blog - again this is a specific field you create when creating a post in your blog, and it is important for this and other reasons to choose an appropriate one.

inpostauthor:
This will return anything where the author’s name corresponds with the search term. For example, a search such as - emarketing inpostauthor:Mark - will return posts containing the word ‘emarketing’ which have been posted by people named ‘Mark’.

blogurl:
This does not return words which are only present in the main domain name of the blog but in the rest of the URL. In many blogging systems, this is likely to return similar results as a search using inposttitle

There is an alternative way to achieve this by using the Advanced Search option which is accessible from the main Blog Search page and will allow you to sift through the results in the same way.

All useful stuff and certainly makes it clear of the importance that Google places on the role that blogs are already playing which will no doubt develop further.

We know that identifying the best keyword phrases is going to be key to our efforts to get better rankings through Search Engine Optimisation or better coverage in Search Advertising programmes. It can also help to achieve a more comprehensive coverage in our chosen area by identifying keyword phrases in adjacent areas that are relevant to what we offer.

To help in this task and find the best keyword phrases, there are a number of tools available to help us achieve this and a lot of them are free!

Here are ones that I have looked at and consider worthwhile.

WordTracker
Probably the best known tool in the field and self styled “Leading Keyword Research Tool”. It is charged for, although there is a limited free trial, but it is also very complete in what it offers across a number of Search Engines.

Google AdWords: Keyword Tool
Gives ideas for new keywords associated with your target phrase but does not indicate relevance or give details of number or frequency of searches

Overture Keyword Selector Tool
Returns details of how many searches have been carried out in the Overture engine over the period of a month and allows a drill down into associated keywords containing your keyword phrase as well.

NicheBot
NicheBot has a mix of Wordtracker and Overture based tools as well as a nice keyword analysis tool which focuses on Google’s results

Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool
One of a set of tools available at the Digital Point website – this engine gives search numbers on keywords from Wordtracker and Overture sources

In addition to these, although some of the keyword tools mentioned above already include it, I would also recommend taking a look through a Thesaurus (online or paperback) to open up other avenues. Sometimes you just can’t beat going back to basics!

Keyword phrases are the words that you focus on either in your website pages or in your online advertising and the ones that you wish to be found for when you attract visitors to your site.

Keyword phrases are key to two elements of working with Search Engines: optimising a website and using Search Advertising effectively. Effectively these are the phrases that best represent the content of your site and that you wish people to type into their Search Engine in order to find you , your website and your products.

Some ways of identifying the best keyword phrases for your website:

• think about what your product or service does or more importantly what benefits it offers;
• talk to clients and ask them what words sum up what you do;
• use some of the tools available to help find what words are commonly searched on and what other words and phrases are similar to them;
• examine your direct competitors sites and their online campaigns and see what words they are focusing on.

Remember: it is how you are perceived by others that is the important point to remember and not necessarily how you believe that you are perceived.

How you use the keyword phrases is important but finding the right ones is critical or else all the time that you spend using them after that point will be time wasted.

Email has revolutionised business communications over recent years and has rightly earned the label of the Killer Application of the Internet. The use of email marketing has had a similar and profound impact for companies looking to promote their products and services.

It has been especially powerful for small and medium sized businesses (SMEs). Without the marketing budgets of larger organisations, SMEs nevertheless have the same requirements for a cost effective, successful and measurable method of communicating with their customers. Email marketing offers not only this but can be used in every element of the marketing process, from building your brand, driving traffic to your website or marketing special offers, to providing customer service or technical support.

But just why does email marketing offer such possibilities to small business and, indeed, organisations of all sizes? Below are outlined 8 reasons why email marketing has to sit right at the top of every SME’s marketing activities checklist.

1. Successful

First and foremost, email marketing produces results! A well designed campaign using a properly managed mailing list will give response rates which are much higher than other direct marketing methods.

While there are many variables that contribute to response rates, indications are that overall email marketing gains a response rate about 5 times higher than direct mail. By getting a much larger percentage of people interested in what you are offering, immediately you are massively increasing the number of potential sales. Added to this, the quick response methods allow a much faster turnaround of questions and objections thus clearing a way through to closing the sale.

Even though the unacceptable rise in Spam has had a detrimental effect on the proper commercial use of emails in marketing, the success levels of well run, targeted and fully compliant campaigns using full opt-in lists continue to advance in leaps and bounds. Effectively, whatever your goal, email marketing delivers in a way that few , if any, direct marketing methods can match.

2. Targeted

The more targeted your marketing message is, the more likely it is to be successful. Email marketing provides the means of customising each message which is sent out, so that the information, promotion or offer can be individually personalised and targeted.

Effectively, using targeted HTML emails gives you the opportunity to quickly and easily tailor the message to directly respond to each prospect’s own needs and interests. Results consistently also show that the more you can personalise your messages, the higher your response and conversion rates will be.

In many respects, a well run email campaign makes the concept of “one to one marketing” available to all, because of the way that it is perfectly suited to segmentation and personalisation. Whereas printed mailers are created, printed and fixed, with email marketing you remain in control of the process for longer giving you more flexibility both in the overall approach and offering.

3. Economic and Cost Effective

Email marketing eliminates the significant time and expense of full graphic design, printing, postage, handling and so on which is associated with printing and processing traditional direct mail campaigns. Yet with graphic html emails, you are able to create the same imagery and provoke the same responses with the added benefit of having follow up information instantly available via your website.

Perhaps just as importantly, with the correct maintenance of an email list, the cost benefits increase as does the ROI through the closer relationship established with the recipients. Coupled with the higher response rates that email marketing attracts, you therefore get more positive responses, more quickly and at a lower unit cost! Win – win situation!

4. Trackable

When using email marketing, you can track the results of your campaign in real time thus providing you with instant feedback on its success. This allows you to respond to developments as they happen and to follow up while the campaign is still in progress.

For each message, you can see whether:

• it was received successfully;
• it was opened and read;
• the recipient used the links in it to reach your site.

There are two immediate benefits of this level of information: firstly, it puts you in a position to be able to make changes to a campaign already underway to improve its response rate; secondly, when sending out follow up messages, you have the possibility to segment your mail list according to the action taken on receipt of the initial one. This allows you to respond immediately to any issues which arise and to complete the feedback loop quickly and effectively.

Moving forward, you also have a complete record of those elements and links which worked best for you and those which require changes to improve their performance. The experiences taken from the campaign can then be applied to future campaigns with a high degree of accuracy.

5. Measurable

As the adage goes, “If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it” and measuring the success of your marketing spend is more important today than ever. To make best use of your budget, it is essential to keep track of not only the costs but also the results and the revenue that the campaign specifically generates. This will allow you to focus your activities with the most appropriate methods in future.

In addition to tracking the recipients’ reaction to the email, you can also follow their subsequent path through your website, with the appropriate software. This allows excellent visibility as to the success of the landing page and the anticipated route through to the purchase or sign-up page, according to your campaign’s objectives.

Together, this information is invaluable when planning future campaigns or being able to precisely calculate the costs and sales generated by any email marketing activity that you undertake. Hopefully, the ROI (Return on Investment) you achieve will be as good as the campaigns run by companies which have reported ROI rates 40 times higher than those achieved with direct mail!

6. Testable

To achieve the best possible response rates, it is common practice to send any intended piece of marketing material to sample groups to test its effectiveness before starting the main campaign. With traditional direct marketing, this process can be time consuming and costly.

However, with email marketing, this process is fast and effective with results available almost immediately, thanks to the instant measuring of the results. Additionally, as there is no printed material involved, the turnaround for any changes in layout or wording required as a result can be incorporated into the main mailing quickly and easily.

7. Immediate

The speed at which business happens is constantly increasing. Email marketing allows you not only to keep pace with these changes but stay ahead of them, not only in terms of the speed of response to the campaign but also the creation of the campaign itself.

Firstly, the “Call to Action” can be immediate and ideally handled through the website. When you read a compelling offer in an email you can respond using the links in the message itself, usually taking you to a specially created page with additional information and recommendations. Responding to a direct mail piece, on the other hand, requires a much more active response, such as completing and sending off a form or even just picking up the phone. Just as importantly, the responses start to come back immediately! On average, 80% of the responses happen within 3 days as opposed to the weeks which is more normal for traditional direct mail.

Secondly, the creation and distribution of the email campaign is also much quicker. Carefully constructing, producing and sending a good html email which is going to bring the top level results, need only take a matter of days (or indeed hours if you are working with a supportive partner!) rather than weeks for a printed mailer.

8. Flexible & Adaptable

Email marketing is adaptable enough to support your business in many different ways and can help to achieve a variety of different goals. While email marketing is often considered stronger when you are looking to maintain customer relationships rather than forge new ones, it is in fact able to fulfil a variety of different purposes for your business. Some of these are:

• Increase the number of visitors to your website
• Attract new clients, leads or registrations
• Build stronger relationships with existing clients
• Provide improved levels of company, product or service information
• Build brand awareness

These goals can be achieved through the use of emails to distribute different items, each offering different opportunities for strengthening the relationship with the company’s customers. Some of the more common ones include:

• Sales promotions / vouchers
• Account statements
• Company Newsletters
• Press Releases
• Product Announcements

Summary

Email marketing is in itself an excellent method of communicating and distributing information and an essential part of an integrated marketing strategy. Like all marketing methods, it is most influential when used in conjunction with other media with the result that the sum of the parts being more powerful than the individual parts themselves.

With the use of RSS feeds and blogs gaining greater acceptance as corporate communications media, there will undoubtedly prophets of doom announcing the imminent demise of the use of email marketing as a tool for the future. The astute marketer will, however, develop these up and coming channels alongside their email marketing program and so be ideally placed to offer our customers the information they require by the method they prefer.

Well, this isn’t something that I have tried myself but this article claims to show through tests carried out that by using drop capitals on your webpage that you can help to encourage people to read your page and hence buy from you!

The tests quoted don’t show any visitor numbers so it’s difficult to tell if the statistics are significant and, as you might expect, there is a product attached to the trials, however, you just never know. I pass this on as is and as a bit of a curiosity but if you have had any experience with this (positive or negative) then do let me know and I’ll update this piece.

Google’s latest way of extending their index is an interesting one and one which should help webmasters to get a faster turnaround with the initial indexing of their website and getting updates included more quickly. As ever, there is no guarantee that the site will be indexed but this will supplement the Googlebots crawling the sites so should improve turnaround.

So how does it work: webmasters need to create a special format of sitemap in the form of an XML file which is then stored on their site. Google provides a tool to do this at Google Sitemap Generator, but there are some others which are available online and make the job a little easier such as Auto Sitemap or XML Sitemaps to name but two.

You can now tell Google about your sitemap file which you should do at the Google Sitemaps page - you’ll need to create a Google Account if you don’t already have one but there is no charge. Once logged in, select ‘Add a Sitemap’ and then type in the address where you put the sitemap, which will normally be something like “http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml”. Then click on ‘Submit URL’.

And what’s the benefit? Well, it gives you a little more control over making more certain that all of your pages are indexed which is a plus and there is an element allowing for “hints” which should permit specifying how often updates occur. Also according to a Q&A session with Shiva Shivakumar, engineering director and the technical lead for Google Sitemaps, posted on Search Engine Watch, there is support for auto-notification which will help keep more pages on your site up to date in the index.

Verdict: well worth the effort - anything which adds to the speed in which updates on your website gets into the index is worth it. Only when they’re indexed can we work on improving their focus and ranking in the Search Engine Results.