Internet Marketing Ireland: 10 Tips for improving your websites ranking
1. Write and submit articles to the article directories.
2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.
3. Answer people’s questions on www.answers.yahoo.com.
4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.
5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com.
6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com.
7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.
8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100’s of free blog directories.
9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.
10. Optimise each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.
Improve your search engine ranking by writing articles
Writing is the best way of getting your website ranked in the search engines. Search engines, and indeed web visitors like content and lots of it. By incorporating a blog and lots of articles in your website you are well on the way to helping your site rankings.
Another way that you can use writing and articles you have created to help your search engine rankings is to submit them to an article directory. One of the best ones to use is article dashboard and this contains thousands of articles on just about any subject you can imagine. The idea is that you submit your article and include a link back to your website in the footer of the article. Website owners can then pick up these articles for inclusion on their websites which results in giving your site multiple back links.
For example I might write an article about marketing in Ireland and post it to my blog, and then modify it and submit it to an article site. This kills two birds with one stone, it gives you new blog content which helps your ‘on site criteria’ i.e. inclusion of relevant content on your website and plenty of off site linking content both of which will help your sites search engine rankings, particularly if you include search terms and keywords in the title and body of your articles.
Effective SMS Marketing by a gym In Ireland
On Friday I received the following SMS message from Crunch Fitness Gym in Clonsilla, Dublin that I used to be a member of. It said “ST PATRICKS SPECIAL. Rejoin Crunch fitness before 7pm Mon 19th and receive a free Nike Rockstar course and no membership joining fee. Ltd spaces avail. 01 8025906″
This is a good example of using SMS marketing to try and reactivate dormant customers using a direct response mechanism. As we know it is much easier to sell to past and existing customers than it is to sell to new ones. Seeing as the cost to send 1 sms message can be less than 5cent this makes it a much more cost effective and less wasteful medium, than sending a direct mail packages by post.
Also at present response rates for SMS marketing in Ireland can sometimes be as high as 40%, I think people are much more likely to read an sms message than they are to sift through the junk mail at home. Receiving a SMS message is still something that is very hard to ignore as opposed to receiving a ‘junk’ mailing piece.
This SMS message was also good as it made some attempt to give a reason for the promotion. People like to know the reason why you are making them an offer and a St Patrick’s day offer is as good as any.
Another plus point of this message is the use of a free offer and waiving of the joining fee; this helps to strengthen the offer and makes it easier for people to try. An even better approach might have been “no joining fee and first month free – try us out a no cost”
Using a deadline for the offer is another positive thing about this SMS marketing message, by specifically giving a date and time prospects know that they need to at quickly. This is quite a strong call to action. Perhaps it could have been made even stronger by saying call 01 8025906 now avail of this offer.
Can you use sms marketing in your business? It can be very cost effective and relatively straightforward to implement. Don’t think that you can just use it to reactivate old clients; there are a whole host of other possibilities for it. It is particularly suited to time sensitive offers such as notifying customers at a bar that they are running a comedy night or having a special happy hour.
Just Take Action! (But Make Sure It Is The Right Action)
Imagine two would be Entrepreneurs lets call them John and Mark. Both of them are working in jobs and dreaming of being their own boss heading up a successful business.
To save argument just imagine that both these guys have the same business ides. The idea is to start offering an online backup service to small businesses in Ireland to help them safeguard the information on their computers in the event their PC crashes.
Here is how Mark approaches his dream.
He makes a list of all the tasks that he needs to complete and draws up some goals for where he wants to be in six months.
He finds a company that provides white label software for setting up your own name brand backup service.
He commissions a web designer on elance to create him a website. He finds a hosting company to provide him with secure hosting space. In the meantime he puts together a list of business owners that he knows and calls them all outlining his new business and offering them to use the service at a reduced cost.
Each day in his lunch hour at work he calls 5 businesses and makes his pitch. Sure to begin with he gets very little interest, actually it is hard to even get past the secretary in most places, but it only takes him 20 minutes per day and after about 4 weeks he starts to get the hang of it and is signing up 1 business per week for a 1 month free trial.
After 6 months Mark is just ahead of his targetted goal and asks his boss if he can work a 4 day week, to which his boss agrees.
Now he spends half a day per week calling round to business parks and offices, and the other half day ringing his current customers and making sure they are happy with the service and asking them if they can recommend any other business owners that might be interested in the service.
He continues like this for another 6 months and smashes through his targets for the business. Now each month the business is generating enough income to replace 75% of his full time salary, he knows that if he were to be working at it full time he would be away. So he meets with his employer and explains the situation and amicably hands in his resignation. Mark is free from a Job and is now full time in his own business.
And this is how John approaches it.
He sits at his desk at work and fantasises about being his own boss, what kind of car would he be driving an nice new BMW 7 series – yes thats right.
He tells all his work colleaugues that they are wasting their lives, and that he is going to start his own business and break free from the rat race. Every lunch hour he spends 30 minutes reading a forum blog or coming up with a new strategy. Perhaps it would be better to offer other services as well as online backup, surely these business owners must want other things.
He dreams up all sorts of other schemes that could work alongside the main online backup business. Yes his company is going to be big, if Google can do all these different things then surely why can’t my business.
A month passes and John is still tweaking his business plan and financial forecasts, wow look after a year if all goes well I will be loaded he thinks.
6 months passes and by now all of Johns workmates and friends have got sick of hearing about how John is going to revolutionise the world of online backup. They joke amongst themselves that John is a bit of a loser.
A year passes and John has now has his business plan professionally bound and got a designer to create lots of different logos and created business cards and brochures. Now he feels he is ready.
He marches into his bosses office and tells him he is quitting. Life is too short to be sitting in a dead end job, John is going places.
He searches on daft and finds a nice central dublin office suite for just €1800 a month. He buys some furniture and sets up the office.
On his first day working full time for himself John gets in early. He spends the morning chatting to a mate of his on Skype about all the ideas he has for his business. Then he spends 2 hours adjusting the furniture in his office so it will look its best for his clients. 4:30pm comes and it is time to go home, hell he is the boss he can leave when he wants.
Now expand this same scenario out over 24 months.
Mark keeps adding customers each month and the customers he has are referring new ones on to him. He has been able to take on a telemarketer to set up appointments for himself to make his day more productive. He is signing up plenty of customers for his service. Sure there have been setbacks like the day when his backup server crashed and he had to let all his customers know they would have to rerun their backups, but these things are to be expected when running a growing business.
Meanwhile John has taken out lots of adverts in the paper and spent a fortune on a TV advert on the Dublin city channel, well he did look good sitting there in his best suit showing off his offices. But none of this has resulted in many customers. He spends a lot of his day on forums moaning and bitching about how it is so difficult to run a business these days. He has run out of cash so decides to take out a loan from the bank, surely it is only a matter of time before his business “comes good
So the moral of this story is start small and build up your business slowly, take action a little and often and you will get there. Don’t waste your time dreaming and procrastinating as this will only end in disaster and frustration!Stop reading my blog and take some action in your business!
Making Your Irish Pay Per Click Marketing More Effective
Increasingly business owners in Ireland are waking up to the possibilities of spending some of their advertising and marketing revenue on Search Engine pay per click campaigns. The most popular of these is the google adwords system.
The advantage of a ppc campaign is that your promotional message is displayed when your target customer base is actively looking for a solution to a specific probelm by searching for it in a search engine.
Another benefit of ppc is that it is possible to make all of your marketing accountable, you can very quickly see what is working and do more of it and stop what isn’t working. This simply isn’t the case with traditional advertising which is much more expensive and harder to track.
So Irish businesses are jumping in head first and hoping to get some more business from this new medium. However based on some of the campaigns I have witnessed a lot of them won’t be getting a good return on their investment.
The good news is that there are a number of ways you can make your Pay Per Click Campaign more effective:
- Continually test two adverts at once, drop the weaker performing one and keep the best one, then create a new advert and test this against your best one.
- Make sure your landing page is relevant. So often I see advertisers sending traffic to the homepage of their website rather than deeper into a part of their web which is closely relevant to the original search term.
- Capture contact information. Always try to capture the contact details of your prospects, at the very least an email address and name, even better if you can get the postal address and phone number. Getting this information will allow you to follow up by sending additional information. Remember on average it takes seven contacts before a prospect decides to do business with you. One of the best ways to capture prospect information is to offer something of value in return, perhaps a free book or other information.
I hope this has given you an idea of how you can improve your pay per click campaigns. If you need any help then please give us a call and we can help you.
Getting an Irish Web Design Business to the top of the Search Engines
One of the blogs that I regularly read and find very useful for information about web marketing is this blog for tailored consulting a web design firm in Australias Gold coast. They are currently doing a live case study to look at tips and techniques for getting this belfast web design company an increased search engine ranking. Have a look at the case study for some tips on how to improve the search engine position of your website
Joint Venture Marketing Ideas for a Furniture Retailer
Sometimes the most cost effective way of promoting a business is to piggy back on the back of an existing one. The marketing jargon for this is a joint venture and is where you work with a business that already has a relationship with customers that match the profile of your business.
If done correctly then this can be a winner all round for both of the businesses involved and for the customers. The business that has the customer list (the host business) benefits by being able to offer something of value to their customers, the business making the offer (the beneficiary business) gets exposure to its target market very cost effectively and the customer gets an offer that may be of value to them.
Here are some examples of Joint Ventures that a furniture retailer could use. They revolve around doing JV’s with businesses that have customers that might be in the position to purchase new furniture. For example people that have just moved house. I would recommend that you try and do a JV with estate agents where you could give them a voucher worth say €100 off new furniture. This will benefit the real estate agents by making them look good and it will generate leads for the furniture business.
Another idea might be to approach property developers and offer furniture for free for use in show homes in return for the furniture company to be able to leave promotional materials or discount vouchers for each visitor.
The furniture company also consider approaching small builders and decorators who do renovation and improvement type work for home owners. Most likely once you have had your home redecorated you will then consider getting in new furniture.
Also how about targetting properties that have recently been sold and offering a complete package for furnishing the house.
These are just some simple cost effective ways to grow a furniture business.
How not to start a small business in Ireland
Here is a real life lesson that should be a warning to would be business owners in Ireland. Someone I know recently opened up an alternative health centre. They had an idea that they would like to offer Reiki services, and because they had an interest in angel card readings they also decided to open an shop selling Angel products. They rented a two room premises on the first floor of a high street. They spent 2 months fitting out the shop, buying stock and ‘getting everything ready’.
Now 3 months after they began they are starting to panick, everything is set up and they have spent well over €10,000 but there have only been a handful of customers and sales of less than €500. Given that this person gave up a well pad job of over €40,000 per year they are starting to get pretty worried about how to turn things around.
This person has made the classic mistake of thinking that because they have an idea and a premises and stock that they have a business.
They couldn’t be more wrong. What makes a business is customers, and lots of them, and a proven system for getting more customers, looking after the current ones and keeping in touch with them.
What she should have done? If we were to rewind the clock with the benefit of hindsight this is what this person should have done before quitting a well paid job and spending €10,000 of their hard earned savings.
- Start small on a part time basis. Rather than launching full on with all the overheads of a premises and no initial income I would have recommended that she hang on to her job, taken just one room of premises or maybe even started from a spare room at home. If things started to take off then she could have then tried to cut back on her work and gone part time. People often forget how hard it can be and how long it can take to replace a full time income from a new business. Often it can take entrepreneurs years to get to the stage where the income they take from their business is on a par with that from their previous jobs. Sure sometimes you can get lucky and have a business that takes off like wild fire in the first month but hey you also have a chance of winning the lotto too…
- Not tried to do too much. Instead of trying to open a shop and provide therapies at the same time I would have held back on the shop and just focused on one core aspect of the business, the therapies. Once that was up and running then by all means add on other additional services.
- Perfected the marketing. Rather than spending all her savings on stock I would have recommended she invest her money wisely on a proper marketing plan and execution of that plan. It can take a lot of time and resources to identify which is going to be the best way to attract paying customers and better to do this when you have the safety net of a secure income from a job to fall back on rather than when you are down to you last few euro.
The trouble is everyone who ever started a business always presumes it will be a huge success and doesn’t consider
failure. All to often people focus on what I call the ‘fluffy’ aspects of starting a business such as buying a flash computer and making their premises look just right. Don’t get sucked in by having to have a fancy website, stationery and other such things. Instead if you focus on the one thing that matters – getting and holding on to customers – then you will do much better in the long run.
Are You Making as Much Money From Your Business as You Should be?
Today we are going to look at one way that you can make more money from your business. A lot of the time business owners focus solely on attracting new clients and customers. Also a lot of the time they only offer one service. Whilst this is good intially from the point of being able to clearly explain what you do and to focus, it does limit the amount of money you can earn from each of your clients.
An example of this would be the company that does the bookkeeping for my Irish business they have been doing my books month in, month out for over two years now. They charge €50 per month which is very cost effective and saves me a lot of hassle. But I think they are missing out. You see I am pleased with the service they provide, and we have built up a good working realtionship. Yet they have never once offered me any additional services and I’m willing to bet that it is the same for each of their other clients too.
What they need to do is to identify a back end product that they can provide and offer to their existing customers. To do this they could put together a questionnaire and ask me what other similar services I might be looking for that they could then provide. For example I might be interested in payroll services or more in depth financial forecasting assistance. If they didn’t feel comfortable providing any additional services themselves then they could approach a 3rd party company and offer to pass on new customers to them for a % of the ongoing residual business.
So in this example say that my bookkeeper has 100 clients and she is currently getting €50 per month from each one. This means her turnover is €5000 per month. What if she was to offer all of her customers a more detailed financial forcasting service which she charged say an additional €50 per month?
Say only 20% of her clients decided to take her up on her offer, that would represent €1000 per month additional turnover, or a 20% growth in her business. All without finding any new customers but by finding out the needs of her existing customers and meeting them.
Based on this example what other products or services could you offer your customers?
If they have purchased from you before then they already know you and must have liked or trusted you enough to do business in the past. Don’t make the mistake of not going back to them and finding out if there is anything else that you might be able to do for them.
What Business Are You In?
When asked what business are you in most business owners will respond by telling you what their business provides, for example I am a dry cleaner or a shop owner.
However I want to challenge this perception.
I would argue that every business owner is in the business of marketing. If you own a dry cleaning business then your business is really to market dry cleaning services as without marketing there is no business. By making this distinction it forces business owners to reevaluate how they spend their time. In the example of the Dry Cleaners rather than working in the day to day operation of the business i.e doing the actual dry cleaning the owner should be focusing on growing and marketing the business. So for example they should be devising marketing programs, testing different forms of promotion etc
All to often business owners get so absorbed in what their business actually does that they forget the key point to actually growing and having a business that works without them is systems and marketing. Once you can get into that mindset then you start to see the difference between having what is effectively a job working in your own business to switching to the mentality of being the owner of a business.
Michae Gerber explains this much better in his book E-myth - why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it. I recommend you get a copy and start to develop a business owners mindset.
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