Instagram & Facebook – Why?


A few hours ago I read that Facebook had acquired Instagram for $1bn… aptly enough, this news came to me via my Facebook feed. There’s also an official release here from Mark Zuckerberg My first thought once I checked the legitimacy Read more

Return On Influence: The New ROI


There is not a single activity in business which is exempted from a query regarding return on investment.  Focused strategic planning and expenditure to optimise your e-commerce mix is known to be an investment worth making for product and Read more

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Internet Marketing

Top Tweets from BrightonSEO

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Mike in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Seminars | 1 Comment

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Excerpt: BrightonSEO has now been and gone, and what a great event it was too. Congratulations to Kelvin and everyone else involved with the organisation. If it continues to grow at the same rate, they might need to use Brighton’s sparkly new football stadium to host everyone next year. Now that the dust has settled, and in true SEO list style, below are my top tweets using the #BrightonSEO hashtag If I have missed a great tweet, ping me a message and I will add it #BrightonSEO conference review bit.ly/IGhbKu check out our image of @kelvinnewman looking like he is a #rapstar — Matthew Scholey (@SEOevents) April 17, 2012   A few of my favourite bits at #BrightonSEO from @GravytrainLtd gravytrain.co.uk/blog/2012/04/a… — Kevin Taylor (@GravytrainCEO) April 17, 2012   15 Top Quotes and Takeaways from #BrightonSEO j.mp/IXU9mO — Craig Deakin (@craigdeakin) April 17, 2012   @leximills #BrightonSEO:The top quote- “Have two espressos and eat a bag of Haribo”go Lexi go, even sounds great out of context — Richard Smith (@theinternetcons) April 17, 2012   My review of #BrightonSEO for @FreshEgg freshegg.com/blog/brightons… Includes links to the majority of the presentations, plus some classic quotes — David Somerville (@southcoastdavid) April 17, 2012   You know what the most common bit of negative feedback on #brightonseo was about nasty tweets, criticism is cool, nastiness isn’t — kelvin newman (@kelvinnewman) April 16, 2012   How many SEO specialists does it take to change a lightbulb, light_bulb, light-bulb, light.bulb, light bulb? @freshegg #brightonseo — J Lil (@3wdl) April 13, 2012   Would’ve paid bloody good money at #BrightonSEO to see @rishil & @searchmartin continue the conversation with Google & Bing…


Return On Influence: The New ROI

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Mike in Digital Marketing, Featured, Infographics, Internet Marketing, Social Media | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: There is not a single activity in business which is exempted from a query regarding return on investment.  Focused strategic planning and expenditure to optimise your e-commerce mix is known to be an investment worth making for product and service based organisations.  We know that social media performs but for Marketers around the world, the new ROI is Return on Influence. So what is your social media influence worth? Or more importantly how does that influence translate into sales or distribution growth?  What is the bottom line benefit of your digital marketing and how do you measure it?  SEO quantitative analytics and a qualitative evaluation of engagement provide the answer. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is designed around website metrics and engine algorithms that specifically measure the result of activities on web traffic and customer interactions.   The science of it creates measurable analytics that report the success of protocols intended to increase exposure and traffic to your website.  The more traffic you have the more business opportunity you can generate in a similar way as word of mouth generates sales leads and product endorsement. I thought the following infographic, originally from The ODM Group was a good visual reference. Source: infographicsposters.com via Mike on Pinterest How to Evaluate Return on Influence Page Views vs. Unique Visits An impressive business website has a large number of unique visits each month.  But a closer look at the individual page view rate for the site may give a more valuable insight as to the efficacy of the content and overall information engagement. You…


Approach to Marketing a Website

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Mike in Customers, Internet Marketing | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: One of the most interesting aspects of my job is that I get to meet lots of great people and interesting businesses. One such business that I recently met were the chaps from Predator MFG, experts in Stump Grinders. The design and manufacture their own machines and distribute them across Europe, what is unique about their product is that they are smaller in size whilst maintaining more power and precision through engineering. What was interesting about our conversation was covering the many different areas their products and services can be optimised for. The website is obviously a large part of that, however within that there are specific keywords and phrases that need focus. Then there is the consideration of the off-page marketing, for example Youtube! Facebook, Twitter etc… all of which require lots of hard work and content to work for them. With so much choice, it’s easy to be distracted, which is not good with a new website. It’s important to remember the reasons why a website has been built and the objectives for the website. In this case, it was all about 2 keywords and ensuring that their website is represented on the search engines for those keywords. My approach to marketing a website… If we know what the goal is, then we can put in place a plan to achieve the goal. In the early stages it is about information gathering and understanding what needs to be done. Benchmarking – With any marketing plan it is important to know where you’re starting…


The Top Five Content Aggregates

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Mike in Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0/3.0, Web News | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: In a previous post “Curating Content for Niche Authority” we discussed the benefits of using software to collect and distribute relevant content to your website and social networks. The predominant benefit to creating a newsletter type feed by sharing syndicated content is to provide interesting news items and articles for discussion within your niche to demonstrate knowledge and authority. In other words, choosing to curate content within your industry clearly demonstrates to your customer that are you are “in the know” when it comes to your specific product or service sector and thought leadership. As media print publications such as newspapers and magazines continue to wane while the amount of content (and access to content) increases exponentially, news aggregates and article sharing is poised to dominate as an optimal alternative. I asked our team at Generate UK to share their favourite content aggregate sites and to share their insight into what makes that specific software popular with our clients. What follows are the top five aggregates according to Generate UK team members. HubPages A convenient and fast way to publish content without having to edit or manipulate page   layout or complicated settings. The popular platform gives you feedback on the success or popularity of your content by awarding Milestones and a score is assigned to provide a metrical ranking of the publisher. An effective and easy to use software package but advanced users may be disappointed at the lack of brand theme or customisation available for the individual HubPage. Joe’s Top Tip: Adding keywords…


Online Marketing Seminar

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Sam in Internet Marketing | Leave a comment

On 6th March, we held our most recent Digital Marketing Seminar at the wonderful Donnington Grove Country Club. We’d like to thank you all for coming along - it wouldn’t be possible without you! As promised, here are the slides from our presentations. Online Marketing Success Presentation Slides SEO – The Hard Facts Presentation Slides We also showed a video in our presentation to demonstrate Generate UK’s Services which you can view below. If you require any additional information please don’t hesitate to get in touch.        


Social Media. The Facts!

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Kim in Blogging, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web News | 2 Comments

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Excerpt: Social Media is still very much the buzz word of the moment but actually understanding what Social Media Marketing really is and how your business can embrace Social Media, should be at the top of your agenda.  Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. are great tools for communicating and pushing out content. I recently found a great video and found out some amazing facts about just some of the main social networking platforms that are out there. I couldn’t possibly keep them all to myself. Facebook now gets more visits than Google with 11% of the world’s population signed up to the the site.  There are even more Facebook users than there are motor vehicles and in 2011 Ferarri sold 5329 cars. However, they managed to get 5.267.365 fans on thier Facebook page. 50% of these active users log on to Facebook in any given day, and spend an average of 55 minutes using its services. Twitter has become one of the most popular social networking services and has created many business opportunities. Although you can only use 140 characters in a Tweet (which often doesn’t feel like enough) the average Tweet only contains 40 and the average user has 115 followers. Lady Gaga is the most followed person on Twitter with 15.864.378 followers. The average person spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube. 88.3 billion clips were viewed in October 2011, which accounts for two in every five videos viewed online and LinkedIn gets two new people signing up to it every second. Oh…and one last…


Digital Marketing Seminar

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Mike in Events, Internet Marketing, Seminars, Social Media | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: On the 6th March, Generate UK will be running the next leg of our successful digital marketing seminar series. These events are all about sharing the fundamentals of marketing your business on the Internet. Our objective for the events is always to share and engage with our attendees, who are a mixture of existing customers and others whom we would welcome the opportunity to work with. When preparing for the event, we were discussing our approach and what our key message was going to be this time.  Our challenge is to come up with a set of presentations that engage with an audience that is at all levels, from an experience perspective. When you break it down like that, it is less about marketing and more about sharing a process, a set of fundamentals that can be applied offline as well as online. A great example of this is an infographic from Salesforce.com below: Source: salesforce.com via Harold on Pinterest   When you break it down like this it actually starts to make sense, my perspective is as follows: Listen – When I first started in sales, working for software companies; my sales director constantly spoke to me about having “two ears and one mouth” and using them in that order. It sounds basic, however it does apply to marketing your website, what are your customers talking about, what are their challenges. Also, it’s not just about what your customers are saying but what they’re are not saying about you… who are your ambassadors. Engage – One of…


Tips to Improve Your Klout Score

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Mike in Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Media | 1 Comment

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Excerpt: Before reading this post, if you’re not sure what Klout is, then you may want to visit our previous post about What is Klout all about. We also posted a follow up commentary about a change to the Klout algorithm in November. Ok, welcome back… At the end of 2011 Klout had reached over one hundred million users worldwide who were interested in understanding the analytics of their social media interaction and online influence.  The directory continues to grow exponentially and with it a number of new applications and reasons to get on board with Klout. Maintaining a Klout score takes a moderate amount of online interaction on a daily basis.  Some have commented that retaining Klout scores can be something of a full time job, requiring input on a variety of social network sites in order to build a higher score.  Inactivity on social media networks does cause the Klout score to drop dramatically, which is consistent with the fact that its sole intention is to measure online influence.  If you aren’t contributing to information streams or digital community on a regular basis you are not going to be influential at all.  It takes a level of participation to achieve a high score in Klout’s qualitative measurement model. Is Klout it worth it? CBS News New York created an excellent piece evaluating who is using Klout and outlining some very practical purposes.  What exactly does having Klout mean?  It can depend largely on the industry with Justin Bieber achieving the impossible perfect score of…


Made to Measure Blinds: the choice is yours

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Sam in Internet Marketing | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: Made to Measure Blinds is a UK based company dedicated to making blinds to fit your windows. They have been running for over 14 years and have a wealth of experience to offer clients. Their website shows customers exactly how to measure for blinds with a step by step guide and how to fit blinds with videos. Made to Measure blinds have many different styles to offer from Venetian to roller blinds. Within all these designs they offer even more versatility providing different patterns and fabrics. They have so much faith in their products they offer a 12 month guarantee on all blinds and have a simple, yet versatile selection. Using their roller blinds as an example, I will demonstrate their ordering process. When you go through to the roller blind page on the website you have four steps to complete. The first is to decide the type of blind you want. You can choose from natural designs, different colours or patterns. You also have the option of fire proof and blackout – great if you’re putting roller blinds in your bedroom as it totally blocks out the light while you sleep! If you choose a particular design, green for example, you are taken to step two. You are shown all the green roller blinds they have to offer including patterned and blackout options. If you’re decorating and need a particular colour, this process if fantastic because it makes it quick and simple. Once you have chosen which colour/shade/pattern/type of green blind you want…


Why you should be using Pinterest

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Mike in Ecommerce, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0/3.0, Web News | 4 Comments

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: One of the most fascinating things about social media micro-sites and gamification modules is their widespread adoption if the concept is novel and innovative.  There is no shortage of social networking sites to explore and it seems like a new one comes out every month.  Is there a promotional benefit to being on social sites?  Yes.  Do you need to be on all of them?  Probably not.  However, if the micro-site has the potential to successfully build community and interactions around your products or services, it may be worth the effort. And if you think you have seen it all when it comes to social networking sites we encourage you to explore Pintrest, an exciting new platform developed by Cold Crew Labs in Palo Alto, California.  Pintrest was launched in March 2010 and by December 2011 the site had achieved more than 11 million visits per week according to metrics at HitWise.   In 2011 the start-up also raised $27 million dollars of venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz. From the start the innovative social bookmarking and sharing program generated huge laurels and interest and was covered by Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and Mashable.  The social site in its beta version received a 4.5 star iTune App rating and a Twitter following of 396,728 (Although they could follow a few back!) users by February 2012.  The network remains a closed application available by qualified invite only for the time being. How It Works Visit the Pintrest site and download the toolbar shortcut for…


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