Making A Good First Impression Online

It always amazes us here at oneweb just how many websites have homepages that are so cluttered you can’t immediately see the content and struggle to gauge what the site is actually about. At first glance you are bombarded with adverts, banners and some text you daren’t hover over for fear of opening another ad box. Website owners are so desperate to get their keywords in, they forget all about the first impression they are giving new visitors. Thankfully, within the latest algorithm update, Google has put in place the incentive for websites to tidy themselves up and produce quality content. The algorithm acts as a quality filter by penalising websites with undesirable clutter and top heavy advertising. Phew.. We thought it was a good time to put together a reminder of the basic ‘First Impression Rules’ that should govern how you layout your homepages and/or landing pages.

Your website is very often the first time a potential customer comes across your business. In less than 60 seconds they will have asked themselves:

• Have I arrived at the right place?
• Is this a credible, professional company?
• Does this website make me feel comfortable?
• Does this website offer what I am searching for and can I trust it?
• Do I feel welcome?

You may think that design is not the most important factor in a website and that functionality plays a far more important role, but it’s design that’s responsible for making that good first impression every time. Read more >>

Business Blogging Tips & Tricks

Welcome to part 4 of the tips & tricks tutorials, this time it’s business blogging. We keep going on about blogging. There is a very sound reason for doing so: Search engines look for ‘new and relevant content’. A blog gives you the tools to add keywords to your website very inexpensively. Here’s some tips on business blogging:

There is no such thing as instant results or a sure thing in internet marketing. For that matter, we can expand that statement to all marketing. The most expensive TV commercials can (and often do) fail. Therefore, when looking to business blogging as a marketing tactic for your business, do so with the following basic understanding: business blogging is a long term process, not a short term solution.

Unlike other marketing methods, business blogging is the process of building a relationship with potential customers. When blogging, consider the following:

• People prefer to do business with people they know and like.
• Nobody likes to hear (or read) a slick sales pitch.
• Just because you say it doesn’t make it so.

As business owners it is hard to avoid the trap of self importance. When we attend chamber meetings and business networking events we spend our precious few seconds giving our elevator speech (which is almost always an abbreviated sales pitch). Because an elevator speech is geared toward educating folks about your products and services, they make for horrible business blog postings.

When blogging, you should focus on helping others. Keep your topic focused on your visitor and give them FREE information they can use to improve something. Do not try to write a single blog post on more than a single topic. Your first target audience member are the search engines; if you try to include too many topics, then the search engines will not know how to list your info.

Lastly, be personal. Business blogging is informal by nature: so do not try to write poetic master works. The biggest fear of business blogging is someone will judge your business based on a misspelled word or the incorrect use or a comma. Some may, but most will not. Unless, of course, your business is writing!

Does your website have a blog? If not, you need to think about getting one integrated. At oneweb we add blogs to existing sites every day. It can be a relatively cheap development add-on for your site and the gains from blogging can, and most likely will, pay for themselves many times over. Contact us today for some advice or a quote and get your blog out there.

The new Facebook News Feed: Love it or hate it?

Facebook users have had mixed reactions to the revamped News Feed the social network began rolling out Tuesday night. Instead of asking users to choose between ‘Top Stories’ and ‘Most Recent’ links, the new News Feed adjusts content based on the last time they checked it. Users who rarely log in, for instance, see top stories from their networks. More frequent users see recent content in chronological order. Facebook also changed the way photos are displayed in the News Feed, making them larger and more prominent.

The most drastic change to the News Feed concept is the addition of a news ticker. Above the chat column, users now see real-time updates from their networks. When they click items from the ticker, the content is brought up in a hover window and the user does not need to leave the page in order to interact with their updates.

Facebook’s News Feed now delivers top stories to you based on the last time you logged in. That way, if you haven’t logged in for a few days, you won’t miss important life events in your News Feed. Users can also adjust their News Feeds by marking or unmarking updates as ‘Top Stories’.

Recent opinions include: "I don’t need everyone to know what photos or comments I ‘Like’ and I don’t want to know that depth of other people’s communications, either" and

"I’ve been asking for a long time for a way to make sure I don’t miss the most important things in friend’s lives, especially those who don’t post often, while a long string of inanities from talkative friends scroll by"

We’d like to hear from more of you. Are you enjoying the latest changes or are you annoyed by them? As my mate Charlie always says "We Fear Change!"

Facebook Launches the Subscribe Button

Howdy Facebook Fans! I’m sure you’ve spotted it by now, Facebook’s intriguing new feature called the Subscribe Button. This new feature adds new flexibility to the Facebook news feed while adding important features popularized by Twitter and Google +. The new button adds another layer of complexity to an interface that already bewilders many non-geeks, but the promise of removing unimportant bits of information from their news feed has many Facebook users excited. Or does it?

Subscribing To Other Facebook Users

Facebook rolled out the new Subscribe Button with everyone subscribed to all updates from their friends. If users change nothing, their Facebook experience stays the same as before. However, they can edit the content received by managing their friends. Users can also change the update settings for a friend while visiting their friend’s Facebook page. Choices include life events, status updates, games, photos and important updates. These new choices make taming the Facebook news feed possible. With their news feed bridled, Facebook users may find renewed joy in the Facebook experience. No longer sifting through junk, users will see only updates from their friends that interest them. However, subscription content from non-friends will include all their public updates, with no filter options available. All good so far.

Letting Other Facebook Users Subscribe

Users can now allow non-friends to subscribe to their public status updates. Any posts, photos or other content that they deliberately mark “Public” will appear on subscribers’ walls. Users follow others like they do with Twitter or Google +. To allow Facebook users the option to subscribe to their updates, users must edit their profile and then click the “Subscribers” link under their photo. By clicking the Edit Button, users can turn the new subscriber function on and off. They can also decide whether to allow comments on their public updates.

Benefits Of The Subscribe Button

If you always wanted to get rid of all the junk in your Facebook news feed, than the unveiling of the new Facebook Subscribe Button will make your day. In the past, the only way to stop the endless parade of junk updates was to un-friend the worst offenders. Now users can keep their friends without fear because they can choose to see only the content that interests them. The Subscribe Button also expands opportunities for all Facebook users because they can now share information with the Facebook community without allowing them access to their wall as a Friend. Similarly, the community now benefits from other users’ public information, even when they are not friends.

Analysis

Analysts / Haters will eagerly watch how the social public receives the Facebook Subscribe Button. The extra button and the new Twitter and Google + behavior may be enough to make users abandon those two competing networks to focus only on Facebook. Others may think the added feature layer complicates a software platform that already does enough singing and dancing. People alienated by the Subscribe Button may find refuge in the simpler worlds of Twitter and Google + but, as usual, Facebook holds an ace in its hand that helps guarantee the success of the new button: users must opt in. If they do not choose to use the Subscribe Button, they do nothing and their Facebook world will stay the same. Simple, yet brilliant!

Google’s ‘Plus’ Social Networking Opens to the Public

Internet search giant Google has thrown open its recently launched social networking service, ‘Google Plus’, to everyone.
The company said anyone can now sign up for Google Plus and connect with people they care about. Earlier, the service was available only through invitation as part of trial runs.

"For the past 12 weeks, we have been in field trials… We are nowhere near done, but with the improvements we have made so far, we are ready to move from field trials to beta and introduce our 100th feature: open sign-up. This way anyone can visit google.com/+, join the project and connect with the people they care about"

Google unveiled ‘Google Plus’ in late June as part of efforts to garner a share of the lucrative social networking space that has so far been dominated by Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook, which has about 750 million users worldwide. The company also announced several new and improved features in the service’s ‘Hangout’ video feature and said it has applied some of its search magic to the network as well. Google Plus’s ‘Hangout’ conferencing feature, which lets users video chat with multiple people at a time, will now be available on all phones running on Google’s Android operating system — more specifically, users that own smartphones with front-facing cameras. The Hangout feature currently works with phones running Version 2.3 (Gingerbread) of Google’s Android system. The company also said support for Apple devices will be made available soon.

Additionally, Google is also introducing “Hangouts on Air”, which allows a user to make public broadcasts, as well as allows users to view broadcasts as spectators.

The search function, now accessible from the Google+ search box, will return results that includes content from the social network and the web.

Why Use Social Media?

Here is Part 3 of our Science of Social Media Blogs. Reasons to use Social Media in marketing your business:

• Quick and easy to start. You could launch a Facebook page today or get a blog going in a few days.
• Low cost. You can get started in social media and blogging for very little money. They are among the most cost-effective methods of reaching your audience.
• Instant interactivity. Both blogs and social media can give you nearly instant market feedback – good or bad. We get all kinds of feedback through the comments on our blog; people also leave reviews and other comments for us on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media channels.
• It’s all about the Search Engines. Surveys indicate that 90% or more of people begin their purchasing process in search engines. Blogs and social media make it more likely that your prospects will find you online when they search.
• Inbound marketing. If you read our blog, you know that we’re big fans of inbound marketing at oneweb. Outbound marketing is telemarketing, direct mail, cold email blasts, TV and print ads – all the things that buyers tend to block out more and more. Social media and blogs are essential inbound marketing tools.
• First mover advantage. For blogs and social media, there is an advantage to moving first. If you don’t jump into the conversation, your competitors will (if they have not already) and then you’re fighting an uphill battle to become influential in these online conversations. Start now to claim that first-mover advantage.

oneweb are here to help you grow your business online. You want to get into blogging? You want to get social media working for you? You need a professional team working on your search engine optimisation? Contact us.

The web is so fast moving that nobody can stand still, let alone wait to get involved. Get in touch with us today, tell us your ideas, describe your vision and we will let you know how you CAN acheive it.

Using Social Media For Success Online

Welcome to Part 2 of our tips & tricks mini-tutorials. This time it’s about inbound marketing and social media.

With inbound marketing we are taking advantage of the way people want to communicate today. We all search for products and services everyday but are we able to find you or your competition? Search engines deal with hundreds of millions of searches per day. We read blogs and tap our social networks to find answers to questions, solutions and product recommendations. Inbound marketing is about making it easy for people to find what you have to offer online. There are 4 distinct stages to successful inbound marketing: create quality content, optimize the content for search engines AND humans, promote it strategically then analyze the results.

Content Creation for Social Networking in Business
Content can come in hundreds of guises. It can be blogs, e-books, white papers, video and photos, advice or tutorials like this. At oneweb we produce tons of content, for this site and others, that’s how we aim to keep your interest in our services and products. When you’re creating a lot of content try to publish on various channels, making sure you optimize for those different channels. Just to illustrate the importance of content creation, here is a piece of data. Companies that blog generate 55 percent more visitor traffic. You may well ask, why is that? Blogging allows you to talk about topics that are more appealing to people and allows you to make more interesting correlations. You can use long tailed keywords, you can attract more inbound links and you can use the comments section to generate conversations. Your blog helps you become more interesting on social media as well. Take the content that you create on your blog and you share it on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and other networks. The way we at oneweb transform our blog readers into leads is by using ‘calls to action’ at the end of each of our blog posts. You’ll notice that this blog post has a three ‘calls to action’ inviting you to contact us, comment on the post and/or share the post with your social network thereby generating leads and hopefully new business opportunities.

Optimizing Your Content
The second step in our inbound marketing methodology is optimizing your content. Optimization really includes two elements: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the elements on your site such as page title, meta tags, descriptions, and alt tags. Off-page SEO refers to the ‘authority’ of your website, measured by the number of inbound links you can accumulate, this will elevate you in the eyes of search engines and place you higher on the results pages. If you want to get deeper in to this, you can look at the different SEO elements on your page. They need to be consistent: the same keywords should be present in the page title, the URL, and the description. If you are curious about how your website is performing, if you have all those elements and if they’re working, oneweb offers services in validation, error checking and fixing, usability testing and SEO reporting, contact us for more details.

Content Promotion
The third part of our inbound marketing methodology is promoting your content. Once you start creating really valuable and remarkable content, you need to find ways to share it. It’s no coincidence that some our clients’ companies that blog and manipulate social media have increased visitor traffic by up to 79 percent. If you have something meaningful to write about on your blog, you will be more interesting on social networks. Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg and Delicious. Get them working for you. So where should YOU share your content? What channels should YOU utilize? You will need to experiment with this part because it differs from site to site. A few general methods that everyone can use are:

• Invite readers to “Like” your post on Facebook. Provide a button in your e-books, blog posts & emails.
• Offer the option for readers to retweet your content.
• Maximize the traction you are getting from email marketing by testing different subject lines.
• Allow comments. You may get a load of spam but actual visitor comments are invaluable and give you an idea of how you are doing.

Analyzing Results
Creating content, optimizing it and promoting it is all very well, but in order to improve results and drive success, you will need to be constantly measuring results. To do that, you need to track not only the number of visits you’re getting, but also the number of leads. There are many tools out there to help you track and analyze visitors and data. The most comprehensive are provided by Google and are generally free to use. At oneweb all of our websites come with monthly visitor statistics reports for you to see what’s working and what isn’t. Get in touch with us today and find out what oneweb can do for your business online.

Remember, get the most out your website by manipulating social media networks and steer those inbound links to your content!

Should you wish to save or print a copy of this post, then click the .PDF logo here and download a copy. Thanks for your interest in our tutorials for online success, we would love to hear from you, whether feedback, ideas for future tutorials or questions, so please leave us some comments. See you next time.

Get blogging and start #winning

Hey guys. This is part 1 of our ongoing tips & tricks tutorials about #winning online. oneweb can offer sound advice, drawn from years of online experience, and we love to pass this information on to you guys. Here are some valuable tips for blogging.

The first one is that the title should be keyword rich. You want to use good keywords – keywords that your readers are searching for – in your titles. Most of the things we’ve seen and tested show that having an image in every article is good. It makes it more visually appealing. It gives people something to gravitate towards rather than just a whole bunch of text on the page.

We would always recommend using both e-mail and RSS subscriptions. oneweb can build you an RSS facility to include in your site. There are also ways to do email subscriptions which we can help you with. When you publish a new blog article, it can automatically go to the people subscribing to the blog by e-mail. For us, about a third of our blog subscribers are by e-mail. Other sites have 70-80% of their blog readers subscribing by email. Some clients use RSS, some use email more, and you should have both of those available to make sure that you’re making it as easy as possible for people to get your blog content if they’re interested in it.

The other thing that’s really important is leveraging calls to action in order to drive more traffic to your landing pages. It’s important to have a call to action in every article, and that’s basically a link to something where people can register, opt-in, start a trial, buy a product, something like that to get them moving down the sales and marketing process. I can tell you that by adding calls to action to our blog, we almost tripled the number of leads we were getting from it. People often ask us, how do I get more comments? Some of the great ways to do that: ask a question at the end of the article or be controversial. The more controversial you are, the more comments you will get. I know that from experience. Also, leave part of the issue untouched. If you completely cover a topic, you’re not really leaving room for people to add something to it.

If you need article ideas, check your sent items in your email. Most people, businesses and marketers are getting questions all day long from customers and potential customers about all sorts of things. Checking and seeing how you’ve answered those questions can be a great way to cover popular topics. You can also look at FAQs from your sales people. I also think it’s important engage the whole company and not dump all the blogging and content-creation responsibility on one person. How do you engage the whole company? We’ve tried a bunch of things here at oneweb and have quite a few different people who are writing for our blog. We do contests. We do public praise. We’ve certainly been able to gather a lot of support from our team. We’ve built it into some of the employee goals for a couple of different groups in the company.

Get everyone addicted to the process of blogging, the feedback and the positive loop that can happen by publishing an article. oneweb are here to help you. Blogging has become an essential component in the pursuit of online success. Contact us today for help, support, guidance, whatever you need really, and let us help you take your website to a whole new level.

Remember, the search engines are looking for ‘new and relevant content’ from you so give it to them!

 
Should you wish to save or print a copy of this post, then click the .PDF logo here and download a copy. Thanks for your interest in our tutorials for online success, we would love to hear from you, whether feedback, ideas for future tutorials or questions, so please leave us some comments. See you next time.