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!