Twitter is a great marketing tool but people often get it wrong, either by broadcasting too much, being too pushy or ignoring their followers. The best way to treat Twitter is as if it’s a networking event. Anyone who networks regularly knows you don’t walk into the room and immediately force your business card onto everyone or tell them what you sell and ask for a cheque! Networking is about building relationships with people, offering support and advice and raising your profile – and from that, business normally follows. Twitter is exactly the same – it’s about connecting with people, not giving the hard sell. If you haven’t quite got your head around using Twitter for business, here are five quick tips to get you started.

1. Use your profile
When you open a Twitter account you’ll be able to create a profile, which includes a 160 character “bio” about you, a photo and a web link. This profile is often the first thing people see when they find you on Twitter, so make sure you fill it in.  If there’s nothing about you, or your photo is the standard Twitter “egg”, you’re less likely to get people following you. Upload a decent photo (preferably of you rather than your logo), add a few words that describe who you are and what you do and include a link to your website.

2. Be yourself
On Twitter, people will follow you and engage with you because they like you so be yourself. Yes, you’re on there to represent your business but if all you do is talk about work people are going to switch off. Get involved in conversations, mention blog posts and news stories that you found interesting, let people get to know the real you rather than some corporate image. The 80/20 rule is a good one to follow here – make sure 80% of your tweets are social and 20% are business-related.

3. Give away a little
A great way to demonstrate that (a) you’re a lovely person and (b) you know your stuff is to give away your knowledge. Look out for people asking for advice on your specialist subject, and don’t be afraid to help out. Keep an eye out for anything your followers can help with too by retweet ing other users’ requests for advice. It’s all about good karma here – help others and the help will come back your way when you need it!

4. Be polite
Don’t ignore your followers. If someone replies to you, or is kind enough to retweet one of your tweets, thank them for it. Twitter is all about communicating, but if it’s one way it’s not going to work. Join in the conversation – but never say anything you wouldn’t say face to face, because once it’s out there, there’s no taking it back!

5. Take part in Follow Friday
Follow Friday is a great way to thank your followers for sticking with you – and with any luck they’ll return the favour. Every Friday you can highlight your favourite followers by sending an @ message with their names and the tag #ff . Some people do themed Follow Friday tweets – the clients they’ve worked with this week, or their favourite bloggers and so on. Other people just tweet random lists of people they like. It’s entirely up to you – but it’s a very powerful way of highlighting your followers and getting some new followers in return.

If you’re not yet using Twitter for business then the team at HodgesNet can help! Have a look at our Social Media Services or give us a call on 01793 608777 to discuss how we can work together. 

Part of search engine optimisation involves getting your keywords right, so people searching for those words find relevant content on your website. However, the term “keyword” is deceptive because it doesn’t have to be a single word – rather it’s a phrase which can be as long or as short as you want.

“Long tail keywords” are longer phrases that use multiple words, and using a long tail keyword on a web search can deliver very specific, targeted results. To demonstrate, search for “holiday cottage dorset” (without the quotation marks) on Google. You’ll get 980,000 results – and it will take a very long time to filter through those to find exactly what you want. However, if you tailor your search – for example, “holiday cottage dorset wifi 3 bedrooms sea view” – you’ll only get about 28,000 results – still a lot, but giving you more chance to find what you’re looking for.

The same search technique can help you find products quickly too. Take cameras, for example. A search for “digital camera” comes back with over 700 million results – but if you search for a specific camera, say the Canon 1000D, the results drop to about two and a half million. Adding the word “review” to the search term halves the number of results again.

So how can long tail keywords help you with your own search engine optimisation? The key is in having plenty of content on your website. If you sell different coloured widgets but you don’t mention the colour options on your website, you’re unlikely to be found when someone searches for “red widgets”. The more detail you include on your site, the more chance your pages will be found for long tail keyword searches.

Traditional SEO isn’t always the answer to attracting long tail searches though – after all, it’s pretty difficult to include such specific phrases in your text without it sounding contrived. This is where blogging comes into its own – because whereas your main landing pages might be fairly generic , you can blog about very niche topics which will attract those long tail searches. So if you sell shoes your homepage might concentrate on terms like ladies’ shoes, men’s shoes and sports shoes, but you could have blog posts about specific brands of shoes, special shoes for various sports, certain colours or styles of shoes and so on – and then when someone searches for “ ladies’ pink kitten heel shoes” you’re more likely to be found because you have a blog post on exactly that topic!

If you’d like to find out more about long tail keywords or how blogging can get you found on Google, give the team at HodgesNet a call on 01793 608777 for a chat about how we can help you.

Image: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Email marketing is a fantastic way to keep in regular contact with your clients, customers and leads. When done well, it’s a really effective marketing tool. However it’s not enough just to send out a plain email from your Outlook account every now and then – email marketing is all about branding, and you need to make sure the emails you send are consistent with your brand – and that’s where many people struggle.

At HodgesNet we have an email marketing service that lets you send branded, customised emails to your mailing list as often as you want for a low monthly fee. However, we know there are free email marketing providers out there – so why should you use our service rather than, say, MailChimp?

Well for a start our emails are only branded with YOUR business identity – not anyone else’s. While MailChimp’s service is free up to a certain level, all your emails will go out with their logo on them – which devalues your brand because everyone knows you’re using a free service. Wouldn’t you rather people thought you valued your business enough to invest in your brand?

HodgesNet’s email marketing is also completely custom designed. When people sign up to your email marketing list they won’t get a standard welcome message – we will provide you with customised welcome, subscribe, unsubscribe and update pages with your branding on them – again, you won’t be advertising anyone else’s service.

The other tricky bit of email marketing is designing the layout of your newsletter. MailChimp and other free email marketing providers offer a range of templates but they won’t be unique to you – and setting up your own layout can be difficult. At HodgesNet we design our templates from scratch so you will be able to send emails that perfectly showcase your brand and your products and services.

The good news is that our email marketing is well within the budget of every business. For as little as £20 a month you can send unlimited, customised, branded emails to up to 500 contacts – and if you need to send to a larger database, you’ll find our prices are very reasonable.

And best of all, if you start using our email marketing service before the end of month we’ve got a bonus for you – we’ll set up your account for free and we’ll also design custom newsletter and flyer templates for your business for free too!

If email marketing has been on your task list for a while then this is a very good time to do something about it. Have a look at our March Special offer and then give the team a call on 01793 608777 to arrange a no obligation chat about how email marketing can benefit you.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Google’s head of search spam team Matt Cutts has dropped some hints that indicate Google will be tweaking its search algorithm in the coming days. During a panel discussion at the SXSW festival in America, Cutts revealed websites that “over optimise” or “over SEO” their content will be punished by the new changes.

There are some websites that have been built entirely around popular keywords but the content rarely matches the topics – and these are the sites that will be affected by the Google changes. The tweaks aim to equal the playing field a little so that high quality sites run by people who perhaps don’t know all the tricks of SEO will rank well – while those sites that use “black hat” SEO trickery will suffer. According to Cutts, the changes will affect those sites that “throw too many keywords on the page, exchange way too many links, whatever they’re doing to go beyond what a normal person would expect.”

At the same conference, Duane Forrester from rival search engine Bing also talked about the increasing importance of social media when it comes to ranking websites. More weight is placed on social media “shares” of your content than ever before – or as Forrester puts it: “Does the rest of the world think you have a great product? If they do, they will amplify this. If you’re not engaged socially, you’re missing the boat because the conversation is happening socially about you and about your content. Those are really important signals for us. Whether you’re involved or not is your choice, but those signals still exist whether you’re in the conversation or not.”

So how will the tweaks to Google’s algorithm affect you? Chances are they won’t. If you’re writing good quality, relevant content that addresses topics that people want to read about then you shouldn’t notice any difference at all. At HodgesNet we have always recommended that you include keywords in your blog posts but that you don’t overdo them – and that’s exactly what Google are also suggesting. When you write web content you always need to put the reader – not the search engine – first. If you include a keyword in the title and two or three times in the body of the article it will still act as a signpost to Google to tell them what the article is about. But if you spam your content with keywords, you will lose out when Google ranks your pages. You also need to make it easy for people to share your content – because every share counts as a vote of confidence in you, and boosts your web ranking.

If you would like advice or assistance on how to improve the ranking of your website through social media, SEO and blogging, contact the team at HodgesNet for a no obligation chat. You can call us on 01793 608777 or fill in the form on the right and we’ll get straight back to you!

Image: imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There are all sorts of factors that matter when Google and the other search engines rank your website. For example, the age of your domain, the relevance of your content to the keywords, the number of pages and frequency of updates all make a difference. Another factor is the number of “backlinks” you have. Backlinks are external links that point to your website and, to a search engine, a high number of backlinks is an indication that your site is valuable and useful. After all, why would people want to link to your content if it was no good? One of the ways you can improve your web ranking is to find a way to increase the number of backlinks you have. You could ask all your friends to link to your site – but there are easier ways to build links to your website. Here are five of the best.

Forums
Most online forums and communities let you include links, either in your profile or in a signature file –text or images that appear along the bottom of every post you make. If you use forums make sure you include your website URL in your signature, because every time you post on the forum you’ll be adding another backlink. Each link on its own is not hugely valuable, but if you are a regular poster you can very quickly build up a high number of backlinks, which will make a serious difference.

Social media
Posting links on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook is another good way of getting a high number of backlinks quickly. Google recently changed the way it approaches links in social media updates, especially to retweeted links, because it sees them as a vote of authority to the website. Make sure you include links to your blog posts, web pages and special offers in your updates. And retweet other people’s links – because they’re more likely to return the favour.

Blogs
While your own blog is likely to only include internal links to pages on your website, try guest blogging for a business blog that complements your own. Not only can you include some valuable backlinks in your post, you’ll naturally also increase the traffic to your website through being exposed to new readers. Also if you comment on blogs or articles you can often leave your name and a web link – make sure you do. This is especially powerful when commenting on high ranking news sites like the BBC or the Guardian.

Article directories
Google recently decreased the value of links on article directories but they are still worth using. If you have content that’s informative but not salesy, try submitting it to sites like ezinearticles.com and buzzle.com. As well as benefitting from the links on those sites, if people use your content you’ll also get backlinks from their sites.

Social bookmarking
Many people use sites like StumbleUpon and Digg to save web pages they enjoyed and share them with their friends. Many of these sites don’t actually create backlinks but they are still worth using as they let people see your content – and those people in turn may share your links on social media or blogs.

Linkbuilding is a really effective way of improving your website’s search engine ranking – but it does take time. If you don’t have the time and would like someone to manage your linkbuilding for you, have a look at HodgesNet’s SEO and Linkbuilding Services or give the team a call on 01793 608777

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about the new social media website Pinterest and we explained why it could be really useful for some – but not all – businesses to engage with. In this article we’re going to give you a few tips on how you can start using Pinterest to raise your business profile and drive traffic to your website.

The first thing to do is to set up your profile properly. There’s only so much information the site allows you to add, but you can include some blurb about yourself, a photo and a web link and you can link your Pinterest profile to other social media accounts. Make sure you’ve filled in plenty of information about your business so people visiting your profile know exactly what you have to offer. Also make sure you include the link to your website so people can easily find out more about your business.

One of Pinterest’s rules is that you shouldn’t use it for self-promotion, which could be a problem if you plan on using it solely to showcase your own products and services. While it’s ok to include a couple here and there, think about using it to build up a picture of your target market. What sort of lifestyle do they lead? What makes them tick? What are their dreams and aspirations? This might sound a bit complicated – but once you start thinking about your customers in this way it can lead to you improving your marketing generally, not just on Pinterest. Here’s an example: your business provides alternative therapies like massage and aromatherapy. Who are your customers and what do they enjoy? You might find that your customers lead holistic lifestyles so they are interested in healthy eating, ethical products, exercise and so on. Build up pinboards around those themes and you’ll start to connect with the right kind of people – and with any luck, in time they’ll be interested enough in you to discover your website and buy your services.

Another good technique is to follow those companies that complement your own and re-pin the things they pin. Taking the example above, it could well be that your potential customers are interested in healthy foods, so follow healthy food companies, comment on the things they pin and re-pin some of them to your boards. By sharing the things they like you’ll build a relationship with them and hopefully they’ll share back. You’ll also encourage their followers to follow you, as you obviously have similar roots.

Encourage people to re-pin your pins and engage with them on the site. When people comment on your pinboards make sure you reply, and return the compliment by commenting on their boards too. Like all social media networks, Pinterest is all about making connections – engage with your followers to build relationships.

Make it easy for Pinterest users to share your content by adding a “Pin it” or “follow” button to your website. The more people pin your content, the more people will visit your website to find out more about you.

Finally, a word of warning. Pinterest links all images to the source they are pinned from and while most people appreciate the additional traffic to their website that Pinterest brings, many – especially photographers and artists –  are also concerned about the copyright issues involved. Pinterest itself is contradictory on copyright issues – it’s against the site’s rules to self-promote using your  own content but at the same time it says that users are solely responsible for any content they pin. At the moment it’s a bit of a legal grey area and we’re sure the issue will be resolved soon, but for now if you’re using Pinterest, just make sure you leave the source link intact and beware of using the work of professional photographers.

For more help with using Pinterest for business give one of the HodgesNet team a call on 01793 608777 or use the contact form above to get in touch.

Between 2011 and 2016, Cisco systems anticipates that mobile data traffic will outgrow all fixed (cabled) data traffic by more than 300%, globally. They predict that smartphones, netbooks and other portable devices, such as tablets, will be responsible for 90% of the global mobile data traffic during 2016.

These stats are inline with many of the predications that Wi-Fi networks are going to become the norm “Based on the accelerating activity of the past six months, the industry can expect to see rapid expansion of Wi-Fi networks worldwide, that will open up new markets and enable broadband users to enjoy the truly reliable and high-bandwidth experience they’ve been waiting for” concluded Michael Fletcher, sales director: Sub-Saharan Africa at Ruckus Wireless.

With the the growth of mobile Internet, more Wi-Fi networks popping up everywhere and the average person owning three mobile devices that can connect to the Internet, you need to make sure you are riding this wave of technological advances.

It seems that there are many companies that are responding to the mobile revolution, including Google, with their latest update of the Google Search App on Windows Mobile.

The updates from Google include:

• Google Autocomplete: The same as we have on desktop search, as you type in your search, their autocomplete feature offers search predictions that may match your search term.
• Voice Search: No integrating more voice features, you can avoid typing all together by simply pressing the microphone and speak your query into the search engine.
• Your Location: With permission, Google can use your location to provide nearby results easily and accurately. Shopping and coffee shops were mentioned in Google’s official update, but there is so much more that location based services like this can be used for.

Getting ready for the mobile marketing revolution

Here at HodgesNet we have helped many clients take full advantage of mobile technology by enabling them to use social media services, setting up geo-location based check-in software, creating mobile apps, using SMS (text) marketing and much more. Below are out top 5 tips for getting your business ready for the mobile market.

1 – Ensure you have a mobile ready version of your site: People are using mobile search and are engaging more and more with websites on the move. Check with your web team that you have a mobile version of your site set up and working correctly so that your users can read your website.

2 – Use QR codes: QR codes? What are they? You may have seen these funny looking square barcodes on food packaging, adverts, the TV, flyers and even exhibition stands. They are two-dimensional barcodes that cab be read using an application on mobile devices. After taking a photo or scanning them, they point the user to a web page, provide contact information or a download (a discount voucher for example). Remember: don’t point people to your homepage, use a specific landing page for each QR code – and make sure it is a mobile compatible page.

3 – Have a lightning fast website: Remember that most mobile devices can connect to the Internet without needing a Wi-Fi signal. They can use the slower 3G or 2G mobile networks. If you bulk up your site with heavy images and lots of rich media, it will take forever to download your site. Keep it simple for the mobile version of your website.

4 – Get your own mobile App: If you sell anything online, have website with special niche interest or simply provide regular content to people online, get your own App developed and sell it online for additional revenue. You can create free apps if you want to also, bit if you provide content or want to sell your products, you may need to check the terms of service of the iTunes Appstore and Android Marketplace. We wont mention the hidden SEO benefit from mobiles Apps either!

5 – Use mobile technology more yourself: If you want to engage with a community or group of people, having something in common always helps. If you start using mobile technology yourself in your marketing and daily work like for communication, people will start to see this and get used to you sending messages via SMS, checking in and using mobile landing pages. In turn they will respond better when you ask them to engage with you using mobile technology.

If the team here at HodgesNet can help you and your business become mobile marketing rockstars, call 01793 608777 or use the contact form above to get in touch.

Stats source http://www.techsmart.co.za/

Following the rollout of the new Timeline during February, Facebook has announced that all fan pages will switch over to Timeline on 30^th March. So if you have a Facebook business page what does this mean for you, and what should you do to prepare for the new layout?

The switch to Timeline will bring a host of new features to Pages. One of the most exciting is that businesses will be able to pin a post to the top of their wall for a week – it’s a great way for you to let people see your latest offer or exciting news that otherwise would quickly disappear further down the wall. Another new feature is the ability to send and receive private messages to your fans.

However, the biggest change is that all business pages will open on the Timeline by default. At the moment you can select which page you want your fans to visit, and businesses have created custom landing pages to host competitions, gain newsletter sign ups or make special offers to people who “like” the page.

From April onwards visitors will instead land on your Timeline which shows your wall posts (including ones you choose to pin to the top) and is headed by the new “cover photo”. This is a large banner-like image that stretches right across the page. A little creative thought can create a stunning-looking page but Facebook have some official guidelines about what you can and can’t use your cover photo for:

Use a unique image that represents your Page. This might be a photo of a popular menu item, album artwork or a picture of people using your product. Be creative and experiment with images your audience responds well to.

Cover images must be at least 399 pixels wide and may not contain:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
• References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

All cover images are public, which means anyone visiting your Page will be able to see the image you choose. Covers must not be false, deceptive or misleading, and must not infringe on third parties’ intellectual property. You may not encourage or incentivize people to upload your cover image to their personal timelines.

The cover image size is 851px wide by 315px tall and anything smaller than that will be stretched to fill the space, so logos are not likely to work as a cover image – instead they can be uploaded as a square image that sits within the cover area. So what are you going to use your cover image for? You could use a panoramic photo of your offices, a collage of products, or something more abstract that conveys the feeling or theme of your business. If you’re struggling to come up with an idea, Facebook have picked out some of the best business uses of cover photos to inspire you.

Timeline for Pages is coming, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent your page switching to the new layout on the 30^th March – which means you’ve got three weeks to find the perfect cover photo for your business.

If you need any help with your Facebook business page, our team of experts are on hand – just give us a call on 01793 608777 or fill in the form on the right and we’ll get back to you!

PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising can be very successful at bringing visitors to your website but it can also be a drain on your marketing budget if you get it wrong. Most PPC schemes, like Google Ads, work by charging you for every click your advert gets. If your advert targets the right people and takes them to the right place there’s a good chance they’ll buy from you. However, if your advert attracts the wrong people or they feel misled when they click through, you’re going to be paying for nothing. Here are 5 tips for better Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns.

Be specific with your search terms
When you set up a PPC campaign you specify the keywords that people search for to trigger your advert being shown. It’s very easy to get these wrong, especially if you don’t think carefully about exactly what it is you are advertising. For example, if you run an Italian restaurant in London you might want your advert to show up every time someone searches for the word “restaurant” – but that would be crazy, because your advert would show regardless of what kind of restaurant people were looking for. A better search term would be “Italian restaurant” but if people click through and discover you are in London – but they are in Newcastle – they are unlikely to book a table – and you’ll have paid for the privilege of them not booking. Make your search terms really specific – “Italian restaurant London” will only show when people search for that specific term, and narrowing it down even further – eg “Italian restaurant Hammersmith” – will really hit the spot.

Use Phrase Match and Exact Match – not Broad Match
Most PPC schemes allow you to choose between Phrase Match/Exact Match or Broad Match. Many people opt for Broad Match because they think it will give them the best coverage, but actually it will simply increase your costs by showing your advert on irrelevant searches.  Going back to our example, if you choose broad match then not only will your ad be shown for “Italian restaurant London”, it will also show for any searches that include the words “Italian”, “restaurant” or “London” … because Broad Search looks for the individual words in a search term rather than the complete phrases. The first two options will only show your advert when the exact search term is used, so there’s a far better chance that your advert will be relevant.

Have different adverts for different products
If you sell several different products then write an advert for each one rather than one advert for your whole business. Say you sell widgets, but you have a blue widget, a green widget and a red widget and they all do very different things. Running one ad for widgets isn’t going to be hugely successful as you’ll attract people looking for all kinds of widgets, but running separate ads for each of the red, green and blue ones will be much more effective.

Make sure your advert links with a relevant webpage
If someone clicks through from your advert and then can’t find what they were searching for they will leave your website – but you’ve still had to pay for the click through. If your advert is for the blue widget but the link goes to your home page it might not be easy for people to find the widget they want – so make sure you link the advert to the blue widget sales page.

Do some research
When you select the search terms you want to bid for, don’t just go with your first choice. It could be that it is a popular phrase which will be very expensive per click. Or it could be that it’s a phrase that no one ever searches for, so it’ll be a waste of time using it. Most PPC services have keyword tools so you can find similar search terms and see how often they are looked for – Google’s Adwords Keywords tool is a good one.

If you’d like more tips on using PPC or would like to find out about our Pay Per Click Management service just give us a call on 01793 608777 – we are experts at PPC and can show you how to run a successful campaign.

Photos:
Click image: tungphoto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Key image: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

(News on the recent Google Analytics update included in this blog post)

With any form of marketing, let alone internet marketing, measuring the success of your activity is a must – you need to see how effective it is. You can measure all sorts of things, according to the success criteria that you set for yourself. It could be money you earn, profit you make, how many people respond or how many people start talking about your product.

As a company focussed on online marketing in Swindon, and the M4 corridor, we are helping businesses to measure their internet marketing activity and see the real value they are getting out of it. That is why we offer services such as our Pay on Results SEO service – you pay when you get the rankings in the search engines.

Many people struggle to measure their marketing activity and the success of it. Things such as dedicated telephone numbers for campaigns, specific email addresses for responses and even for the more adventurous, coupon codes.

With Internet Marketing there is one tool that we ensure that clients have set up right from the word go. Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free, web based, reporting tool that shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and information to help you improve their experience when they come back (or for future visitors).

If you tweet content and links to your site on Twitter, share links on Google+, send PR to websites and blogs for them to publish, write articles for article sites, send email marketing to your customers/subscribers, run pay per click campaigns… or any other form of Internet Marketing activity, you can use the standard reports or create custom reports to see how well all of this activity performs. If you are sell products, you can even attribute marketing campaigns to ecommerce spend so you can see which campaign works best on a revenue or profit basis.

Using this you can tweak and change your marketing activity to optimise the return you will get from it, put more time and money into activity that is working and even learn about activity that is producing no results so that you can stop it and save money and time.

If you haven’t got Google Analytics installed on your website, jump over to www.google.com/analytics and set up your account. You will need to follow the instructions to add a small piece of code to your site. If you are unsure how to do this, call us on 01793 608777 or get in touch via the above form and we will be happy to help install this for you.

If you have Google analytics installed and don’t know what it all means, watch this video from Google which explains it all:

Recent Updates To Google Analytics

As they are continuing to improve Google Analytics, features that will be available to everyone later this week will improve your experience and make crunching all those numbers even easier. And quicker! These updated reports will include:

• The ability to watch your reports load - a progress bar will show your the progress of your report loading
• Load reports only once – This will use the caching of data on your computer
• Control your report calculation – The ability to use “fast-access mode” which will letting you control the number of visits used to calculate reports

For the full update – check out the official Google Analytics blog here.