Social networking is a phenomenon that has passed many people by. Some people view it as the most important thing to happen on the internet since the internet itself, others that it’s a big waste of time that yields no results. Both could be right.

There are so many different platforms for social networking that it’s hard to keep track of which one to use, I decided to have a crack a ‘Twitter‘.

Most people’s reaction to Twitter is that it’s a way for people with no life to waste even more time online. When I checked it out, my suspicions were correct.

However, with all these things when there is a mass of people communicating together, there is an opportunity to market your business. After spending some time on Twitter, I came up with the following reasons you and your business should be utilizing it:

1. First and foremost a direct increase in your web traffic.

2. Greater interactivity in terms of people opting-in to your subscriber lists and comments on your blog.

3. The ability to directly connect with people that you would not be able to reach any other way. Possibly even businesses that you want to work alongside, not just market to. This could open the door to some nice co-marketing, affiliate marketing or joint ventures down the line.

4. Increased sales! (Depending on your offering of course).

5. It’s an opportunity to branch out globally. We aren’t just attracting a UK audience interested in web marketing and SEO, but we’ve had people from lots of other countries including France, Australia and the US communicating with us too.

6. Twitter can help you easily generate more ideas for your overall marketing plan by seeing what the competition is doing. You may even find competition that you didn’t know existed.

And now I’d like to invite you to follow us on Twitter and see how we leverage this ‘social media tool’ for networking and strategic internet marketing at http://twitter.com/callowaygreen

The one rule of blogging, presenting or just talking to potential customers is “never say sorry”. However, I’m going to break that rule because what I’m about to show you is appalling. I’m really, really sorry.

I feel so bad to have let the side down, it was a moment of weakness. I should never have been allowed near paper and pen. In fact, they’ve now been taken off me and all copies of PhotoShop locked away (not that I could ever use it).

What I wanted to do was to explain how bad SEO practices should never be used. I wanted to do it in a fun way that conveyed humour with an art form. I ended up with bad stick characters.

You decide:

There, I did it.

You’d have thought I’d learned my lesson, but no, I never learn my lesson and I’m off to write another one. I should be ashamed.

At the beginning of October we were seeing a lot of people download our ebook and it was getting some great reviews. However I’m never satisfied with that; I want facts and when someone invites me to read an ebook I view it with skepticism. Very often those peddling information are just looking for methods of making money because the techniques they’ve written about don’t work. If they did, why write a book?!

OK, ours was free, but it does come loaded with ideas and promises that many will assume are wrong or just plain inaccurate. I don’t blame you. On the face of it, it was a piece of marketing that has resulted in us receiving a lot of calls and so we are now helping even more people with their websites, it worked.

But I wasn’t happy. I’m guessing that many of you having read the ebook and laughed out loud at the amazing humour, simply closed it down and didn’t do any of the things it suggested. I reckon you thought ‘Hmmm, interesting’, maybe sent it on to your IT friend who said “it’s rubbish” and the consigned it to the recycle bin.

(more…)

Last year, around about October, we suffered from a drop in sales. It seems that business was pretty bad all around the place and everyone was holding off on their new websites and SEO. Nobody wanted to risk any money on anything as ‘cutting edge’ as a new website - no sir.

Then the new year came and it kinda picked up a bit. It hasn’t been a great year, but it’s better been than last and things are looking pretty healthy. Then this credit crunch hit the news. I say ‘then’ it hit the news because up until recently when the banks all went fubar and the FTSE dive-bombed, nobody seemed to have noticed that the British economy was taking a turn for the worse.

We’ve been in a downturn for ages though. I mean it, absolutely ages and nobody has noticed. Even the FTSE has been declining, look:

FTSE from October last year

That’s a graph of the FTSE 100 from October last year. Pretty steady decline, i.e. something’s up. Share prices go up, on average and so a downward slide is a ‘bad thing’. This is where business suffers as it’s due to a bunch of crappy profit figures and trade announcements that tends to send the prices down.

(more…)

For some reason, there are still an awful lot of people who hold on to the belief that they can earn a million by just making their website live. To some, the process is quite linear:

(more…)