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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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.        


Making an Impact with Infographics

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Mike in Blogging, Digital Marketing, Infographics | 1 Comment

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Excerpt: As children we are given picture books to read.  The brightly colourful pages combined with a compelling storyline was determined to be the best way to open minds in a way that would stimulate attention and communicate the message.  As we get older we train away from books with pictures  for the most part,  although mediums such as the magazines remain popular. Why? Because infographics work! Below is a great example of an Infographic about the costs for SEO in the UK. Essentially, it is a graphical representation of a survey, however because it is in an infographic it has been shared on blogs and social media. The originators of the infographic are the wonderful people from SEOMoz, who are credited. Source: seomoz.org via Mike on Pinterest   The combination of graphical pictures and text perform very well to convey a concise and engaging message.  While diagrams are nothing new, the use of well organised and appealing infographics have a profound effect of the readability of data or information.  Inundated by web content that is predominantly text based, the eye has a natural preference for colorful and well designed images that deliver smaller pieces of information in a more interesting manner. Many underestimate the value of an infographic with the belief that there was no Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) advantage to using them on your site.  However new reports on metrics confirm that there is a measurable benefit to link building on sites that actively use infographics amid their content selection.  While images cannot be “crawled” by search…


Curating Content for Niche Authority

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Mike in Blogging, Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | 1 Comment

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Excerpt: Directing traffic to your website involves a multiple tiered approach.  The design of your website and the functionality of it provide half of the equation while quality relevant content keeps readers (and customers) coming back for more.  This is the reason why most businesses realise the value of maintaining a blog on their commerce website.  It acts as a conduit to engage the brand product or service with its end user in a meaningful conversation.   It’s relationship marketing at its best! However a common mistake that SMEs make while utilising social media outlets such as Twitter or Plurk is adopting a broadcast one dimensional tone of communication.  It is important to introduce new products or services and inform your clients of new offerings.  Naturally the announcements that you will be most excited about will be your own, and social media networks are idea for announcing press release material and sharing news.   But if your organisations style of sharing involves broadcasting of facts and information in a unidirectional dictatorial format, it may be time to invest effort in diversifying the content you are providing. What does it mean to curate relevant content? In short all businesses should look for opportunities to demonstrate niche authority.  If you are going to recruit new customers (and retain the loyalty of your existing ones) it is important to prove yourself to be not only knowledgeable but established and innovative within your field.  Consider the following advantages to niche content curation. Provide Non-Centric Niche Content How informed are you regarding your…


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…


What is Viadeo and should you be on it?

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Mike in Business Development, Digital Marketing, Social Media | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: Hot on the heals of our recent post about marketing to women with Pinterest, which seems to have become the hottest website on the planet; we thought we’d remind ourselves and our readers that there are other social platforms out there.. many with a much larger user base than Pinterest. Today’s post is one such site… today we are going to explore Viadeo. Viadeo is a 40 million member social network site. It is available in 7+ languages and is set up on five continents. They claim to ‘network and socialise’ which gives them an edge to LinkedIn, more heavily weighted to networking, and Xing which focuses more on being social. Viadeo provide a strong network system enabling you to get in touch with people you don’t know through people you do, but they also provide a variety of social features; groups; communications; sub-communities; agendas; and chat. Founded in Paris, France in 2004 it actually grew from a different network. A small site called Agregator was started in 2000 aimed at entrepreneurs to exchange experiences, ideas and contacts. However, the creators noticed a niche in the market and so made a more versatile sister company which they named Viadeo. The sister company began to take off and before long they were taking in more new members a month than LinkedIn. To accelerate their growth, Viadeo made many acquisitions changing the new company’s logos/branding but changing them onto the Viadeo platform. They joined with Tianji in China, Apna Circle in India and ICTNet in…


The Importance of Link Diversity in Competitive Niches

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Sam in Digital Marketing, Link Building, Search Engine Optimisation | Leave a comment

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Excerpt: The Google Algorithm is a giant black box.  We can make inferences as to what works and what doesn’t work, but one generally held rule is that you need links to rank.  A widely held belief is the more competitive the niche, the more links you need.  There has been plenty of conversation recently about linking not being as important, social signals being more important than links, anchor text not being as important, and other proclamations about the decreasing influence of links.  In the search results that I’ve seen for competitive financial terms, auto industry terms, and health related terms, links are definitely alive and well and there is a definite correlation between the more links and higher rankings. One aspect of link building that often gets overlooked (at least I’ve overlooked it previously) is getting links from different sources.  If you notice link profiles of high ranking sites, they generally have links from a wide variety of sources.  I’ve noticed that when I push real hard on a certain link type for too long, the benefits slowly grind to a halt.  But when I switch up the link type, I’ll notice an additional boost.  For example, recently for a client we got many guest posts targeting a competitive term.  We rose from the top of page two to the bottom of page one, plateauing around position 8.  After a month of being stalled we switched up the link type (still targeting the same term) from guest posting to niche directories…


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