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.

So this got me thinking. We’ve been meaning to create a small magazine aimed at business owners and marketing people to help them make more sense of marketing online and SEO. People generally don’t have a load of spare time in business, so this will be something they can have on their desks so they can try refer to when planning how to make more of an impact on the Internet.

We’re going to launch this next month. But I have a problem and …

I need your help!

What do we call it?

How do we name a magazine that is helping people build their online brand and build their business?

Please add your comments below and you can win a mention… or maybe something better.

On a slightly (only slightly) deeper level people are attracted to people like them. Could be similar tastes, characteristics, hobbies whatever…

Guess what… this very simple truth works with your marketing too.

Most successful businesses are aware of the power of attraction marketing to generate sales and increase their long term client base.

If this is so simple, why do so many companies get it wrong?

Well, most businesses get it the wrong way around. Through lack of a proper plan, they decide to pursue new clients. A bit like the guys you see in the pub that hassle the pretty women after they’ve had a load of beers.

Even when no-one responds to their letters, emails or phone calls; they carry on regardless blaming the recession for the lack of sales.

Here’s an example of a better way…

We are obviously a web development and SEO company. People find our blog and newsletter reasonably funny, informative and useful. So that could be described as ‘attractive‘. Many people have downloaded our free guide to SEO, which in many cases has helped people generate more sales for free.

SEO is a market full of scamsters. By being open, honest and giving away solid free information, we set ourselves apart. People then link to our site and tell others about downloading our material and joining our newsletter.

When we send out details about SEO seminars we host, people respond well and we fill them because people trust us.

So, without spending anything on ANY traditional forms of advertising, there’s tonnes of people who know all about Calloway Green and our ability to help companies rank high on Google and produce great sales results.

THEN whenever someone who follows us decides they want to embark on a full blown SEO campaign, hopefully they come to us.

Now, does this take more time and effort? Yes.

Does it work better than banging out crappy flyers and emails in a shotgun approach, hoping someone will use your product or service? Yes.

So think about your strategy to become more attractive to your potential customers. Remember, people don’t like to be sold to, but they do like to buy. As I found out today when my wife came home with a new pair of shoes!

It all started when on a discussion about the new Health-care Reform Plans that Obama is promoting turned into a “let’s slag the NHS-athon”. Tory MEP Daniel Hannan said he “wouldn’t wish the NHS on anyone” in a TV interview.

This was quickly picked up by the Republicans (you know, the one’s that lost) who immediately went to work on cherry picking all the bad data out of hospital stats, such as “lots of people who go into hospital die”. This is obviously true, a lot of people who get run over by trucks do end up in hospital and unless it was a truck delivering that plastic packing stuff you can pop with your fingers, you’re probably going to die. I suppose they could skew the figures by dropping you off at the morgue, but they’ve gotta give it a go at least.

Anyway, I digress.

So, a war of words erupted on the telly with some even saying that the NHS was run by Muslim terrorists and the like. Given that Harold Shipman could give any Muslim terrorist a run for his (or her) money, it seems they missed an obvious target there. Or they’re just playing on every-one’s fear of terrorism, they wouldn’t do that would they? Would they? Nahhh.

I’m digressing again, my point is this. Eventually the whole thing erupted on to Twitter with even heavyweights such as Gordon Brown wading into the fray and chipping his $0.02. David Cameron’s probably uploaded a YouTube video too. The traffic turned out to be a bit too much for Twitter and eventually it crashed under the force of some people saying “the NHS is great” and others arguing “If you go into a hospital in the UK you’ll come out dead with terrible teeth.”

The great thing about these debates is the haze that appears to get in the way of common sense when people have got a point to prove, no matter how stupid. The following paragraph has been removed from Investors Business Daily when it was pointed out to them that they’re idiots.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

The original rant in all its glory, sans the above paragraph can be seen here : http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=333933006516877

But there’s more! If you’re still on the fence about whether this Internet lark is for you or your business then you’d better listen up. You see, traditional media is now reporting what happens on the Internet. The Internet is now the first place to get your news from. You can also comment and discuss in so many ways that your voice will be heard by somebody somewhere.

The Internet isn’t ubiquitous yet, but heck, it’s going to be pretty damn soon.

Paul Frewer Consulting

We’ve worked with Paul Frewer and his business associate Pete Hayhurst in the past and so we knew that we were dealing with a straight-talking team who had a clear idea of what they were after. So, when we were asked to create a site for their exciting new venture, we were pretty sure we knew what they were after.

As with all Calloway Green sites, it is fully content managed and so Paul and Pete have full control over what they publish. This is important if you’re in a fast moving industry and as there are new designs of furniture being designed and promoted every week, it’s absolutely vital that they can add new products and images whenever necessary. Luckily, that’s a doddle and our integrated product system handles all the file uploading and image resizing necessary to ensure it fits perfectly with the rest of the site.

If you want to check them out, you can nip over to Paul Frewer Consulting right now.

Lewis Psychology

This company was new to us, but we weren’t new to them! It turned out that on one of our regular jollies to the Black Country Chamber event, we had bumped into Teresa Lewis and apparently made an impression. Luckily on this occasion it was a good impression and Teresa remembered what we did when she needed a website.

So, after a brief meeting we worked out exactly what it was the company needed and how that should be portrayed via a website. Essentially, it needed a professional look and feel together with an extremely easy to use ecommerce catalogue – luckily we could do both with ease and so we got to work and created the website within a few weeks.

Lewis Psychology offer a wide range of counselling services from help with conflict management through to personal anxiety and other stress related issues. They really do offer a fantastic service, go check them out : Lewis Psychology

The great thing about social media is that it allows people to get their ideas, their information, their life and put it out there for all to read. If you’re lucky, it will be dead interesting and you’ll be swamped with people wanting to know more. So to exploit it, you’ve got to have something to say.

But I find myself telling everyone I meet that they should get themselves onto social media now and use it to promote and exploit their business potential. Wow, I was wrong – I really should stop it because I’ve completely forgotten who my audience are. What I mean is, they’re not me.

I love social media but I guess even I’m only a light user, I’m certainly not an addict (OK, perhaps a little bit), and here’s the rub – if you want social media to be an effective form of business building, you need to really use it and use it hard.

I don’t mean just pop in every now and then and tell people about your latest air-fix model accomplishments, you need to promote yourself and do something that other people might find interesting.

Oh dear, I’ve done it haven’t I. I’ve said the ‘I’ word. Yes, it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s got to be interesting to someone otherwise people just won’t read it. Ideally it’s got to be both interesting and maybe even something people can use to make money or just make life a bit easier.

And that’s where it all falls over. Saying interesting stuff doesn’t come easy to many people and so if you are one of those, I’d like to just give this little bit of advice : don’t do it.

Don’t use social media and please stay off Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you.

Didn’t think anything of it; thought it might add a bit of humour to the proceedings to. One of them was ‘The mailto: command, a great way to harvest email addresses”.

All my Hubs get broadcast on Twitter (so do  all my posts, ask me about it sometime) and this was no exception so it went out to the great big world.

Now, to explain. Harvesting email addresses is a ‘Bad Thing’. It’s the way that web scraping robots get a lot of their email addresses to be used for spam. They go around, find websites with exposed email addresses and then they add them to their big spam database and send you lots of emails about Viagra and dating sites etc.

My Hub was actually about stopping this from happening on your site not about how to do it, but that didn’t stop someone from ‘un-following’ me on Twitter with the message below:

From @Synthaetica : yes, @andycal , when you post about “harvesting email addresses”, you are not going to be on the follow list. buh-bye.

Hmmmm. Point missed methinks.

At first I was going to post this as a warning with the line “don’t confuse your customers with crazy headlines”, but I’ve changed my mind. It hasn’t actually affected my Twitter follower count (it’s actually gone up), but I would make this comment to those who get upset at headlines in any media – “read the book, not the cover”.

We are surrounded by attention grabbing headlines on both the Internet and in traditional print – but the headline is only an extract of the story itself. You might read the rest of the story and discover something completely different – I know I do all the time.

So is there a moral to this? Well yes – many people go into ‘corporate mode’ and their online persona is completely different to how they behave in real life. It’s a bit like those people you meet down the pub who you share a pint with but then discover they’re complete arses when you phone them at work. This doesn’t wash on the Internet or in social media like Twitter, you need to be natural. If we’re all just keyboard tapping robots churning out what we think people want to here in order to never damage our brand then it would be boring.

The answer therefore is – “Be yourself”. I’m going to keep on writing headlines like this and you should do it too. Here are some of my others:

How to ruin your search rankings quickly

Cloaking your site to destroy your google ranking

I could rename them to something less ‘controversial’, but that would be a cop-out.

Trouble is, writing them can be a pain in the backside. You’ve got to sit down and think of a subject before typing away and creating a work of art that people will want to read. It’s hard writing one, how about writing one hundred?

Well, there’s no time like the present and seeing as there’s a competition going on, I like to think I can step up to the mark and so I’m taking part in the 100 HubPages challenge.

It’s crazy, but hell, let’s go for it!

I’ll update all my posts and details here. You can see if I succeed or fail whale right where it hurts…

The web is full of great sites and it seems there is a boom in places where you can manipulate graphics really easily. It used to be the case that if you wanted to make even minor changes to a picture you needed to download a copy of Photoshop, read through a 300 page manual and then attempt to get to grips with the crazy interface.

If you didn’t have even a small amount of artistic talent, you were left out in the cold. But not anymore! You can now amaze everyone with your PhotoShop prowess without even opening up PhotoShop. Take a look at this:

A little building in Wolverhampton

How good’s that?!!

Get your own miniature versions of your offices here: http://tiltshiftmaker.com/