At a recent seminar we held in Birmingham, we laid down the gauntlet to people who wanted to increase their site rankings. We started a bit of a competition to get people actually doing this stuff because we had an idea that most people still don’t put into action what they learn.

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This is just a short post and update to the details of our upcoming event on the 11th August in Birmingham:

“Turn Your Website into a Sales and Marketing Machine”

We have decided this month that we will be donating half the money from the tickets to Barnardos. They are an awesome charity (in our opinion), running 415 projects across the UK.

Whatever the issue from drug misuse to disability; youth crime to mental health; sexual abuse to domestic violence; poverty to homelessness; Barnardo’s believes we can bring out the best in every child.

So we thought, as a business, let’s get more exposure and money to them so they can do more of what they do best.

We hope to see you at the event if you can make it.

BOOK HERE… http://www.eventelephant.com/onlinemarketingevent

We all love animals (aside: I don’t) and we all think that using them in advertising to win the ‘cute’ vote is a good idea (aside:I don’t think that either) but sometimes you can take it too far as a Russian company did this week when they thought a parasailing donkey would win them friends. Read the rest of this entry »

We haven’t really spoke about Social Proof too much in this blog. But it’s a very powerful addition to your marketing arsenal.

For those of you that have never heard of Social Proof before, here’s an example.

We’ve all seen the cards placed in hotel bathrooms about the environmental benefits of reusing your towels. Research showed that about 40% of guests reused their towels at least once. When they changed the message on the cards to “The majority of guests who stay in our hotel reuse their towels”. An additional 26% of guests reused towels in response to the revised message.

That’s a very simple example, but show that social proof is a powerful influence. When people see that others like them are doing it, there’s powerful influence for them to do it too.

The reason I tell you all this, is that you really should be getting client testimonials on your website.

If you do a great job for people, which I know you do, then get your clients and customers to tell your audience about it.

It’s even better if you can do it by video. Here’s one of our customers talking of his experience:

There seemed to be a frenzy on a few weeks ago for the new iPhone …

This has caused some queuing outside the O2 shops across the UK. Apple seem to be quite clever in the way they use scarcity to build their brand and there’s some kind of assumption that it must be amazing because it’s hard to get hold of one.

Doesn’t really work on me, I just carried on walking past the queue. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 2007 Prince upset a lot of traditional media outlets by giving away his album “Planet Earth” for free on the front of the Mail on Sunday. At the time there were predictions that this could seriously backfire and lead to his albums being pulled from stores as people simply stopped buying them. You could see their point – traditional music outlets were and still are being ravaged by the popularity of music downloads, but did it hit Prince in the pocket?

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… According to Fifa, it didn’t…

This was the joke banded around yesterday after the terrible decision of disallowing England’s second goal even though it was a foot over the line. There was uproar for about 20 minutes, until German scored their third and fourth goal to finish England off.

After 90 minutes, when all was said and done, it was the poor performance people we’re talking about. Not the fact that the goal line technology should be upgraded and they should allow the referee to watch replays. Read the rest of this entry »

Just bought an iPhone? Found out it doesn’t work when you hold it in your left hand? Yeah, so have thousands of others. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s sometimes difficult to find an analogy between the normal day-to-day work that us SEO types get up to and what goes on in the news and then other times something happens that just drops a peachy blog item in your lap. Such a thing happened this morning as the analysis of the England performance unfolded on BBC news and various pundits were ask for their opinion.

I suddenly realised that our love of the England team is pretty much related to our love of SEO. Bear with me, it’s not as odd as it sounds…

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I’ve just subscribed to .Net magazine. For us web designers, it’s a great source of inspiration.

I had put off subscribing for a few months because I thought to myself “HOLD ON, all this information is available on the internet”.

However, each time I go into the newsagents, I pick it up and read it. There is still something really relaxing and inspiring about the printed word. Maybe it’s the tactile nature, maybe it’s because you can just take the magazine anywhere… I don’t know, I just know that people love to read magazines. Read the rest of this entry »