* 1.2 billion mobile webs users worldwide – many of these only use the mobile web
* 8.49% of global website visits in 2011
* Smartphones are only a fraction of web enabled phones
* Mobile searches quadrupled in last 12 months alone
* $3.3 billion spent worldwide on mobile advertising in 2011 – Estimated to increase to $20.6 billion worldwide  a year by 2015
* 300,000 mobile apps developed in the last three years – with over 10.9 billion downloads in that period
* M-Commerce (mobile commerce) expected to reach $119 billion worldwide per year by 2015
* 71% of 16 – 24 year olds use mobiles to access the internet as their main device
* 24 – 36 years olds largest proportion of users buying directly off mobile phones

As the M Commerce market grows, there’s lots of different ways to search for what you’re looking for, including:

* Search by typing
* Voice search
* Gesture search (drawing letters, symbols or pictures)
* Image search i.e. Google Goggles

If you’re not sure if your website is mobile friendly or would like to talk to us about building a new website that is mobile friendly, why not take advantage of our free website report?

1. What are the objectives for your new website?

2. Who do you want to bring to the site? (Current customers / new customers / the media / alliance partners?)

3. What will the positioning be for the site (i.e. upmarket or cheap and cheerful)?

4. Are you happy with your visual brand identity (logo etc)?

5. Besides your current website’s content, do you have other content (i.e. articles, PDFs, videos)?

6. Who will be doing most of the writing?

7. How important is Google (and the other search engines) to your strategy?

8. If search is important to you – what are your top 10 keyword phrases?

9. Do you want to integrate it with social media activity (i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)?

10. Are there any reference sites?

There is a lot to think about, isn’t there?

The answer is that, yes, you can use social media to attract more customers.

Social media = Web based interactive communication software.

It includes:
* Having your own blog
* Commenting on other people’s blogs (with a link back to your site)
* Social bookmarking
* Social network aggregation i.e. www.FriendFeed.com

It also includes the various social / business networking sites i.e.
www.ecademy.com
www.facebook.com
www.linkedin.com
www.marketingcompass.co.uk
www.naymz.com
www.plaxo.com
www.twitter.com
www.viadeo.com
www.xing.com

Social media resources use Web 2.0 technologies. They take advantage of the USP of the web: interactivity. Web 2.0 allows you to share, collaborate and, above all connect with:

* Dormant customers
* Current customers
* Prospective customers
* Advocates
* Influencers
* Suppliers
* The media

How can Social Media help your business?
You can use it to create more awareness for your business, your brand and your products / services. Social media allows you to attract people who read your ‘posts’. It can generate more visitors to your website, sales enquiries and sales.

Social media also enables you to create business relationships (by exchanging messages) and to engage with prospective customers.

The secret to the successful use of social media is to engage with it regularly. If you keep the conversation going, respond to people and watch what they do – you will attract a following, build more business relationships and make more sales.

* Your marketing home
*  Your marketing hub
*  A brand statement
*  A mechanism to ‘build your opt-in list’
*  The nexus of your social media activities
*  A place to showcase your professional knowledge
*  A structured walkthrough of your enterprise
*  An opportunity to test ideas, services and offers
*  An education for your customers
*  Somewhere to place your testimonials
*  An ongoing market research programme
*  A chance to show us who you really are
*  A chance to share and, perchance, to surprise
*  A written medium
*  A visual medium
*  An aural medium
*  A serendipity engine
*  A journey, not a destination
*  A joy to behold

Image courtesy of Norden Farm Centre for the Arts, Maidenhead

Your blog should reside within your website (just like this one does). If you blog regularly, you will automatically be adding more content to your website.  As you know, ‘Content is King’.  More content = More keywords = More material for the search engines to find.

Here is a definition for you. A blog is an online journal.  Think of it as a diary. Now, the thing about diaries is that they can be full of drivel or they can be packed with literary gems.  The diary itself, however, is a series of blank pages, waiting to be filled in (just like your blog entries).

If you are reading this blog, I’m guessing that you are an independent professional, business owner or marketer. What do marketers think about? The answer is ‘customers’. Attracting them and keeping them. That is their raison d’etre.

Your business blog should focus on your customers and their needs – in relation to the products / services which you market. The key is to see your business from your customer’s perspective. Write interesting, useful, helpful, up-to-date and relevant blog entries, with your customers’ needs in mind.

Start by referring to your marketing plan. (You can download one for free here:  www.freemarketingtoolkit.com). In particular, consider your target market segments.

Then think about the keywords and phrases which are relevant to each segment.  These are the terms which people enter into search engines, such as Google.  I suggest that you have an up-to-date list of the keywords, which you should include within your blog entries, website articles etc.

Another question I am often asked is “how often should I blog?” The best known bloggers, such as Seth Godin, blog (almost) every day (and sometimes several times a day).  I suggest that you blog at least a couple of times a month and, ideally, once a week (* gasp *).

I wish you all the best with your marketing!

Image courtesy of www.scribblers.co.uk

Nigel Temple

During my internet marketing seminars, this is one of the most frequent questions I am asked.

Firstly – a little terminology. ‘Unique Visitor’ (UV) = someone visiting your site during a defined period (i.e. a month). They can be identified through their IP (Internet Protocol) address. This is not a perfect way of measuring UVs. In fact, you will find that many forms of measurement on the internet only give you indications and trends. That’s fine, because this information helps to show whether you are moving in the right direction. You can use Google Analytics, or another stats service, to find out about UVs (and much more besides).

Marketing professionals spend a lot of time thinking about Customers. I suggest that you create (or update) your marketing plan, and spend time thinking about your target market segments. Have a clear picture in your mind’s eye of the groups of people you wish to serve. Incidentally, if you join The Marketing Compass (see the right hand column), you will receive a free marketing plan template as part of the package.

If you share useful, helpful, interesting and up-to-date information with customers and customers-to-be, via your website, you will generate Word of Mouth and links back to your site. This is your primary strategy for attracting more visitors to your website.

Do everything you can to educate your customers – they will love you and so will Google! You can do this by:
* Blogging regularly (ideally, your blog should be situated within your website, just like this one is)
* Writing articles for your website
* Uploading videos (here is an example of a video about website strategy)
* Providing a place where you can answer questions.
* Using social media on a daily basis and providing links back to your site (i.e. from Twitter and your Facebook for Business page).

I am shocked by the number of websites which never change. These are Web 1.0 websites; in other words they are ‘online brochures’. A Web 2.0 website uses the USP of the web, which is Interactivity.

By all means subscribe to this blog, as I will be writing in more detail about this fascinating subject over the months ahead. One area I will be discussing is Links – as Google loves to find lots of Links to a website. In effect, an inbound Link to your website is a ‘vote’ of confidence in your site. So remember that:

Links R Us!

At Totosites, we build Web 2.0 sites for our small business clients. We show them the power of customer education, which helps them to attract more visitors and more business. If you would like to find out more, by all means contact us.

I wish you all the best with your business and your internet marketing.

When you use Google, you aren’t searching through websites. You are actually searching through Google’s index of the web. Google builds its index using software called ‘bots’ (also known as ‘spiders’ or ‘crawlers’). When a bot visits a web page, it is looking at the computer code (HTML) of that page. It is trying to figure out what the page is about.

It is also looking for links to other pages. The bot follows these links and any other subsequent links which it finds, in a never ending search pattern.

There are billions of web pages and hundreds of billions of links between them. Google scores the web pages and the links. It is particularly interested in a concept called Relevance and is always asking itself the question:

‘How relevant is this page to the needs of a searcher?’

Google uses over 200 parameters to decide the Relevance of a page, with regards to a particular search. For example:

* How many times do the keywords appear in the page?
* Do the words appear in the page headline?
* Do keywords appear within the page Title?
* Do they appear within the URL (web page address)?
* Does the page have synonyms for the keywords?
* For a keyword phrase – are the individual keywords close to each other?
* Are the keywords towards the top of the page?

I am thinking about writing an e-book on SEO principles and selling it online for £5. Would you be interested in buying a copy? By the way, each Totosites website is Google friendly and we discuss SEO principles with our clients. After all – they need to know about this stuff!

Google keeps its secrets hidden away in a lead-lined vault, deep in the mountains. It is said that only three people know the Google Code and they are sworn to secrecy. If you suffer from insomnia, you can find out more (What! There’s more!) at:
http://www.google.com/webmasters

Nigel Temple

This is an interesting question, which comes up during my internet marketing seminars. For a decade, I only had one website (www.nigeltemple.com). Now we run three websites.

There are arguments in favour of both approaches. On the one hand, having a single website can certainly be time consuming, never mind more than one! Assuming that you have a CMS (Content Management System), you should be spending time on your website every week (and some would argue, every day).

If you serve different market segments, there is a case for having separate sites. This may also be true if you wish to focus on a particular product, service or geographical market. On the homepage, you can then really go to town on specific messages, offers, keywords etc.

In my case, from 1999 onwards, I regularly updated my site. For example, I experimented with the meta data, added new pages, wrote articles, promoted my events, uploaded images and inserted links to other websites.

Subsequently, we launched www.totosites.com our website development arm. Within this site, we discuss internet marketing issues. Marketing strategy and tactics are now served by www.marketingcompass.co.uk – which is also a social networking site for small business owners who are interested in ‘all things marketing’.

I have found that having more than one site gives me more opportunities to promote different products / services. An interesting benefit is that I can ‘cross promote’ between the sites. (Only having one site can become quite complicated, especailly if you do several things!)

Finally, a new website can take advantage of the latest technology. For example, an online Content Management System, which is Google friendly. Technology keeps on moving forward, doesn’t it? So perhaps now is the time to embrace some of the cool new functionality and use it to attract some more customers!

Writing for the Web

I am frequently asked this question during my internet marketing seminars. My answer is: “Once a week”. Here are the reasons why:

*  You want to attract more visitors to your website and more customers, don’t you? If you answered “Yes” to these questions, blogging can help.
*  Clients and seminar delegates tell me that blogging once a week is a realistic target.
*  Choose your promotional mix elements with care and use them regularly. Intermittent blogging is not as powerful as regular blog posts.
*  Your blog can feed your newsletter (which, incidentally, you should send out once a month).

A blog is simply an online journal of your thoughts. For business purposes, you should blog about your professional knowledge. Be generous when it comes to sharing what you know, as the search engines (and prospective customers) will love you when you do this.

Blogging functionality is built into each website which we build. We show you how to use the software and we also show you how to come up with ideas.

Domain names: decisions, decisions, decisions!

Your website address = a domain name. Famous domain names include amazon.com | bbc.co.uk | and wikipedia.org

Selecting a domain name is an important marketing decision. There are a number of factors to take into account. In general, go for a short domain name, as this is easier to say and easier to remember.

The domain name for this website is: totosites.com …which is split into two parts. The TLD (Top Level Domain) is the bit to the right (“.com”). The latter is easy to say (two syllables) and is generally accepted to mean a commercial website.

For UK companies / small businesses / independent professionals, “.co.uk” is a popular TLD choice. Sadly, it comprises no less than five syllables, so it is a little long winded to say aloud.

Within “totosites.com” the bit to the left = the second level domain (SLD). You will probably want to include your business name, or a brand name, or your own name, within your SLD. Quite often, when a client asks me about domain names, I find myself in a discussion about their brand name and all the associated issues.

From a search engine optimisation (SEO) perspective, try to include one or two keywords within your SLD. In my case, I have traded as “Nigel Temple” for many years. So in 1999, I registered “www.nigeltemple.com” and the accompanying website is now in its 5th generation.

There are numerous online resources to help you to find a domain name (and whether it is available). For example: www.whois.net

However, be careful before you buy a domain name as this may create challenges for you, when it comes to building your website. When I originally registered “nigeltemple.com”, I did so via a company in the USA. It proved to be a frustrating and time consuming experience, to transfer my domain name across to the UK web developers.

If you are thinking about creating a new website (and selecting a domain name), by all means talk to us. The Totosites package includes advice on selecting domain names – which is a strategic marketing decision.