Whooah Biz

This is the second part of the internet Marketing plan, from here:

http://whooah.biz/2008/08/is-your-blogbusiness-getting-noticed-your-internet-plan

In the months 4 to 6 you will have to think about the following:

Links

• Using www.linkpopularity.com follow the links for popular sites similar to yours and submit pages from your site to those sites as suggested links.

Discussion groups

• Research the most active discussion boards in your area for sales, and other relevant topics and visit the top half dozen or dozen once a week to participate.
• Subscribe to two new discussion lists and participate regularly on favourite lists in a way that helps promote the newly released products.

 
Web site and infrastructure

• Add excerpts or long explanatory copy for products and services that don’t yet have that.
• Make changes in the wording of key pages to attract traffic on relevant keywords that I have totally missed.
• Check outbound links for accuracy and remove dead links.
• Change or add to the sample makeovers/upgrades at my site.

Marketing Plan Months 6 - 9

Search engines

• Continue to monitor the amount of daily traffic, which search engines are sending you visitors and which keyword phrases are bringing people to your site.
• Register new pages or features in the free search engines and directories.
• Research appropriate keywords for promoting new products, services or informational pages.

 
Publicity

• Distribute at least one press release this month designed to produce more web site traffic and more Marketing Minute subscribers, customized for each of the target niches.
• Distribute at least one press release tied to sales or marketing information form the company.
• Brainstorm with other professionals on ideas that can be implemented.

Direct mail

• Send Marketing postcards to old, not-used-in-two-years mailing list.

Product development

• Create two more audiotapes based on feedback from distributors
• Lay out and prepare for printing the anthology of your site
• Create and polish viral marketing tool and post at my Web site.

 
Posting content

• Convert this month’s press releases into articles and post at free content sites.
• Post your Marketing articles at free content sites.

 
Links

• Follow the links for intriguing sites I’ve recently come across and submit pages from my site to those sites as suggested links.

 
Discussion groups

• Visit the top half dozen or dozen discussion boards once a week to participate.
• Subscribe to two new discussion lists and participate regularly on my favorite lists in a way that helps promote my newly released products and services. Web site and infrastructure
• Complete and launch a new blog type web site on related topic.
• Offer services and inter link to the new web site.
• Consider design or technical improvements to boost site’s perceived professionalism.

Summary

The outline above covers a nine month periods where effectively one would begin again and re-apply the plan in one form another. May be by bring a niche information site online to help drive sales or by working together with partners/distributors.

One notable point with this blog post is that there is no cost attached. How much time would it require to implement a plan like this depends. A basic rule of thumb can be applied. The more time spent on carrying out the related tasks the more effective the results. To reasonable implement this plan one would be looking at 2 – 3 days (16 -24 hours) per a week for the duration of the plan.

Sit comfortably, take a deep breath and relax. What is a rather an ambiguous blog post title and is meant to be taken both ways. You can kill your blog by the posts you put on it or you can do the reverse. This blog post is about how to make your blog posts work for you in a given time allotment.        

A couple of days ago I thought seriously about making Whooah.biz a private blog. My blog is very much a sort of a development to try out new ideas that I will then use on www.WorkConneXions.com or for clients. Waking up on a Sunday morning I read some of the weeks past posts and noticed a few too many errors. There are number reasons for this. My brain works faster than my hands can type. I may suffer from a form of dyslexia. What every the reason the blog posts were not of a sufficient quality to be published. As I thought about this, and talked it over on twitter and with friends, I realised that I was not the only one and that you do not need a degree in journalism or English to make a contribution to blogsphere.

As Sherrilynne from www.Strivepr.com pointed out, nothing leaves the office without being proof read by someone else. My brother Sebastian who is starting work at local law firm www.dc.co.im said that he prints everything out as you just cannot see the mistakes on a computer screen. That is enough justification for all blog writers to contemplate how you are publishing something.  If it is for yourself then fine, but if you are going to share it with blogsphere, how are you going to know if you are achieving what you have set out to do?

Below is step plan that endeavours to insure success in this field:

1.      To write you need to concentrate. To concentrate you need to be relaxed. However you do that is up to you. Whether it is a breath of fresh air or taking a deep breath. Make sure you do it.

2.      There are lots of blog post out there that talk about the writing of a blog post, how you should repeat the theme in the last  paragraph etc. Fundamentally a blog post can be anything that you want as long as it achieves your goals. My approach is too give it a start, a middle and an end and to make sure that it has a meaning and relevance. There is no easy way to do this but the more you do it the easier and better it becomes like anything else. How will we insure that it achieves your goals? By reading below.

3.      Check your blog post, checking it may sound simple but if there is one thing in life that you can not do enough of it is checking. Here are some of my suggestions, you may want to apply one or two of these in any given situation.

A.     Save the blog post in different form than you have written it. So if you have written it in Word than save it as text file and proof read it.

B.     The great thing with computers is that you can increase the size of the text. Why make it hard to read, increase it.

C.     Studies have shown that MS Sans Serif in grey on a white background is the easiest font for the brain to read. Of course one shoe does not fit all so you may have to experiment a bit.

D.     Ask a colleague or a friend to proof read it. This often helps with total comprehension of the piece.

E.      Take a break and check it much later when the brain has forgotten what you have written and you can see it with fresh eye

F.      Print it out, there is nothing like sitting somewhere else and checking it on a different media form

G.     Employ the services of document proofing company. Like this one http://www.betteredit.com/

That’s about all that I can think of for now. With these controls in place either you will succeed or you will find out that you and your friends are not very good at english.

While leading a a truly balanced life now, I make sure that I have time for reading a broad selection of material. The IOD magazine has come up trumps again in the March issue of this year. Yes, I am aware that it is 5 months later, but like I say balance is the key word in life. That is what I try to do now, and probably should have done earlier.

There is an article about Scotland Glenmorangie distilleries that accidently mixed the wrong sort of whisky. Faced with a dilemma they come up with a clever campaign; they used a direct mail marketing  to ask for an official pardon and sold the whisky as a collectors item. The campaign generated a 23 percent response. 8 percent above what you would normally expect.

The best bit is still to come; their direct mail marketing grew. When they launched a special whisky called Arigh Nam Beist (shelter of the beast) for Halloween in 2007 their response rate was 69 percent. Virtually unheard of. A little clever marketing can go a long way. Do you know any such stories? I am sure that Richard Branson could tell a few, how about you?

With the Olympics almost over I was catching up on some of the events last night. The running events always amaze me. Some of these long distance runners, in fact all of them, run with such grace. They run long distance events the same time I could do 400 meters when I was at school and I was one of the best runners in the North West aged 13. These athletes run with such grace that it almost looks like no effort at all. There is a lesson for us all there. I am sure that America and many other countries have much better resources and trainers. But it is the Africans that dominate this sport. While I am sure they train very hard I think they have something more.

Do you run your business on Style and Grace? Would you like to?

Top pages Views for July/Augustus 2008:

It has been while since I have done this, due to a problem with my stats system, I must remember also do this on Work Connexions site. Any where here they are as chosen by you.

At number five:

How to sell a product simply but effective advice.

5. http://whooah.biz/2008/08/7-selling-skills-using-the-word-payment/

At number four:

All about the domain name game. My story about small domain names, ones that are easy to write like wcx.com or delight.biz

4. http://whooah.biz/2008/08/domain-names-what-are-they-worth/

At number three:

Simple but effective advice for page rank.

3. http://whooah.biz/2008/08/top-trick-to-increase-page-rank/

At number two:

How are you keeping your data safe. Explore the world of options

2. http://whooah.biz/2008/07/how-is-everybodies-backup-procedure-an-easy-backup-plan/

Number one is:

What sort of return do you expect from your advertising, the million dollar question

http://whooah.biz/2008/08/expected-roi-return-on-every-marketing-dollar-spent/

I was just reading in the IOD magazine, that Officials at UEFA Euros 2008 are monitoring football fans for non-sponsorship logos and t-shirts, in a bullish crackdown on guerrilla marketing. Although 400 unofficial brands attempted to crack the last world Cup.

I think it is rather clever, perhaps a little heavy handed of the organisers.

What do you think?

First welcome to my new blog design.

What do I mean when I say bouncy, well pretty much as it sounds. Bounce rate is a term used in website traffic analyses. It happens when a visitors leaves your website after just landing on one webpage. How is that possible? I hear you ask. On that beautifully design website of yours. With all that information and well written blog posts. Well it’s easy. For the large part it comes down to design presuming that your blog posts are readable and interesting. (this is the test)

There is no agreed definition for what attributes a bounce some say it in the first 10 or 15 seconds that a user leaves your site other say it is failing to click on another page. My bounce rate I have to admit was too high. This is probably due to monetisation on the old site. I genuinely believe that monetisation offers extra services to users. Unfortunately it was probably too much so I will now have to seek a balance.

According to Avinash Kaushik:

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying

Now there is goal to go for! what are your bounce rates like?