Get Rid of Your Flash Website?

Here’s a statement: It’s time to get rid of your Flash website. They may look beautiful, but when it comes to efficiency, they’re hopeless.

Here’s just a few (out of hundreds) of reasons to replace your Flash website:

• It’s a pain to manage.
• It’s a pain for people that visit your website.
• It’s a pain to browse.
• It’s old fashioned. Read more >>

Our 20 Favourite Online Marketing Quotes

Here are our 20 favourite quotes in the world of online marketing. Some guys know exactly what to say at exactly the right time and these are the best of the best by the best plus a few from our own guys. All of these sum up the ethos of oneweb and how we strive to offer up relevant and high-quality advice to our clients.

• There are no magic wands, no hidden tricks, no shortcuts and no secret handshakes that will bring you immediate online success, but with time, energy and determination you can get there. Dave, oneweb. 2008
• You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it done, they’ll want something new. Steve Jobs, Apple
• In today’s information age of Marketing and Web 2.0, a company’s website is the key to their entire business. Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion
• What makes content engaging is relevancy. You need to connect the contact information with the content information.
• Think about what a user is going to type! Matt Cutts, Google
• If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing. Guy Kawasaki, Apple
• Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about. Benjamin Franklin
• Search, a marketing method that didn’t exist a decade ago, provides the most efficient and inexpensive way for businesses to find leads.
• Word-of-mouth marketing has always been important. Today, it’s more important than ever because of the power of the Internet.
• Corporations must answer questions about why they should be in the blogosphere. Small businesses need to answer questions about why they shouldn’t.
• No matter your sector, chances are that people are already twittering about your products, your brand, your company or at least your industry
• Smartphones are reinventing the connection between companies and their customers. Rich Miner, Android
• Think like a customer. Paul Gillin
• Online marketing isn’t magic, it’s science. Dave, oneweb
• Holding back technology to preserve broken business models is like allowing blacksmiths to veto the internal combustion engine in order to protect their horseshoes. Wikinomics
• Traditonal methods of sales prospecting are grossly inefficient. Spending £5,000 on useful web development can easily cut £100,000 from your traditional sales budget. Dave, oneweb @ Google’s Marketing Conference 2011
• Authenticity, honesty, and personal voice underlie much of what’s successful on the Web. Rick Levine
• In this age of blogging and two-second sound bites, almost no one has the attention span, or time, to read more than a few sentences. Tim Frick
• When you break down all the fluff, there are two ways to promote and market your business: dumber, slower, and expensive — or smarter, faster, and cheaper.
• There is no black magic to successfully attracting customers via the Web. It’s all about hard work. Rand Fishkin

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.

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.