Include Google Maps in your website (Easily)

Google has announced  a new feature on Google Maps that will allow you to very easily embed your Google Maps into your web pages (and blogs !!) simply by copying and pasting a snippet of HTML.  Once you embed the map, it has all the same functionality of the Google Maps you know and love; it’s clickable, draggable, and zoomable.

Just go to the map you like, click on “link to this page” at the top right corner of the map and select the code within the “Paste HTML to embed in website” box.

Here is an example of a Google Map embedded into this page, of Sydney Harbour…. How cool is that !!!

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How Can a Small Business Succeed Online ?

More and more small business owners are feeling the lure of the internet to promote and sell their products and services.  In fact these days, the Internet is often the first place  budding entrepreneurs set up their fledgling businesses. Why ?  Because it is relatively cheap… cheap to setup and cheap to market.

The great thing about the internet is that it is usually very cheap to reach your target market. The problem is, that it is also cheap for everyone else as well.

So how does a small business hope to compete online, when there are some many other businesses – small, large and very large – already competing for their customers.  The answer is remarkably simple – Focus !

How do you sell plasma televisions if everyone sells them? How do you attract searchers for that broad a term? If you need to appear on the first page of search results to get sales, how do you do that as a small business?

The small businesses that are succeeding online are marketing very targeted offerings—extremely specialised products and services. That way, they take advantage of the “Long Tail” effect to get on the first page of search results for something (even if it is somewhat obscure) and they have a good chance of satisfying
the customer with what they do best.

But it means that you must specialise, you must focus on a niche. What is unique about your products? Or your business? Or the way you sell them? What is it that makes you better than everyone else for a certain specific target segment? When you answer that question, you’ll know how to market yourself on the Web. You’ll know what that segment is looking for and you’ll know how to attract them with the right message.

A small business must specialise to succeed on the Web. What’s your specialty?

Ireckon it’s a Dogs Life

Ireckon… a Brisbane based web design company, is a rapidly growing business that practices what they preach.  Ireckon, live and breath the web, using web based technologies not only for their clients, but also as a core part of their day to day business operations…. or as their CEO, Darryl King says – they “Eat their own Dog Food“.

Because Ireckon have tried and tested their own web based processes over an extended period, they have a pretty good idea about what works – and more importantly, what doesn’t… This is a practice that many others in the web design industry should take a much closer look at, rather than just repackaging and /or reselling third party products that they don’t fully understand or in many cases have not even used.

Good on you Ireckon…  

Kicking Off a NEW Link Building Campaign

When starting up a new link building campaign, there are two basic questions you should be considering :

1. What is unique about your site that others might want to link to?
2. Who might be interested in linking to you, and what information would be of use to them?

Gaining a good understanding of the answers to these questions is a fundamental starting point . It helps you gain an insite into the types of information that you may be able to offer the people in your space, or related spaces. It will very likely also highlight, extra contenmt that you may be able to provide, which will offer added value to your customers and potential customers.

Here are the five things that you should also think about when kicking off a new link campaign:

1. Start by identifying who the major media people are in the same space as you. At this stage dont’ be too concerned about their potential to link to you. This should form a complete list of traditional media, bloggers, government, school, and hobbyist sites that are related to your products/services.

2. Next prioritise the list ranging from top tier players to lower tier players. Links from from any of them will help, but getting a link from a top tier player is worth more effort.

3. Re-examine the current and potential content of your site to see how it matches up with the needs and interests of the top tier targets.

4. If necessary (and it usually is), put in place a content development plan to implement the right types of content to match up with the best targets. Several new articles may need to be written.

5. Begin the process of contacting your targets, and getting them interested in the unique cool content that you have.

Remember, good link building should always starts in the same place – Identifying the targets… Good Luck !

4 Benefits of Social Marketing

There are basically four different types of benefits that you can expect to achieve from a successful social media marketing campaign: links, branding, sales and interaction.

Below, a look at each of these potential benefits and some ideas on how you can make maximise them for your specific needs.

Links

Making use of social media for link building is relatively popular within the SEO community, and for good reason. Using social news sites as a platform to spread your content (linkbait) can relatively easily produce thousands of new inbound links to your site. Compare that with traditional methods of paying or begging for links, and you can quickly see why linkbaiting is so popular.

The of linkbaiting is to produce a piece of remarkable content that will spread virally and naturally collect links. The big social news sites already have millions of users, so the concept is to leverage these sites to get your story popular enough so that it’s exposed to their user community. A popular piece of content on these sites is seen by tens of thousands of hungry bloggers looking for stories to blog about.

Sites that are best for link building are probably Digg, Delicious, Netscape, and Reddit.

Branding

Social media marketing goes further than just traffic and links. It is also great for improving brand awareness. It doesn’t matter if you have a new brand or one that is well established, using social media can help build or strengthen it.

Social media is also part of a brand experience when users interact in these channels. If the experience is positive, high-energy, interesting or funny, all of these elements will support a unique brand experience and support ongoing initiatives in this area. Positive or negative experiences here can really have an impact on a brand.

A few examples of positive experiences include funny videos, useful content, flash games, and contests based on user participation. Each of these methods help engage a deeper dialogue or interaction with the consumer and can help get closer to the customer.

Best sites for creating branding are YouTube and MySpace.

Sales

The primary aim for many marketing campaigns is to bring an increase in sales. Sometimes this is done directly and sometimes it can be a very indirect process. It can be hard to create a social media marketing campaign that will result in direct sales. This is because you’re reaching consumers in a non-purchasing stage of the cycle. It contrasts from standard SEO where consumers are looking for what you’re selling and at the point of purchase already. Social media is less intrusive, and part of the reason people engage is because there’s more there than just a selling message. Any content with a strong selling message will generally not be received well.

The best way to generate sales through social media is to show how good your product is in a creative way and compelling way.
Sites that are best for direct sales are YouTube, MySpace or any highly targeted social site.

Interaction

There are a lot of benefits to interacting with your customers through social media. Some of these include improving products or services, establishing trust, being viewed as the authority in your space and creating evangelists.

The most common form of customer interaction in social media is done through blogging. With a blog, your goal should be to establish an open dialogue with your customers. This means that should allow comments on the blog, and you should also be participating on other relevant blogs.

Blogging is not the only way to interact with your customers in social media. Consider reaching out to them in the communities where they hang out but be sure tread lightly as they can very easily have the opposite effect you are hoping for. Remember, social media is somewhere that consumers feel safe from marketers, so you need to have the right approach.

The above are examples for some of the ways social media marketing can be effective today. The environment is still evolving and growing. As we see more participation in different ways, the landscape will pose even more opportunity for marketing.

Australian Online Business Directories

Michael Visser, an Australian based web designer (and more recently Search Engine Optimiser) has highlighted a distinct lack of resources available for identifying good quality Australian Online Business Directories.

Michael has started to develop and maintain a list at his Australian online business directories page.

While at the moment, it’s still in a very early development stage – at least its a start – If you know of any directories that haven’t been listed and you feel it will add value to visitors feel free to let him know of them…

The value of a Top Ranking

In his article What’s a Top Ranking worth at E-Marketing Performance, Stoney deGeyter has provided a superb analysis on what a top ranking is actually worth to a site owner. He goes way beyond the usual “a #1 ranking gets 5 times as many clicks as a #5 ranking” type statement and provides a detailed analysis on many different elements of ranking.

The various issues that may have an impact on rankin value that Stoney identifies are :

What is a Search Engine Worth?
The value of a top ranking on Google is different from that of Yahoo or MSN. Every engine gets a different volume of searchers, a different quality of searchers and a different intensity of searchers. Each of these plays a role in determining the value that a top ranking provides.

What is a Keyword Worth?
All keywords are not created equal… a top ranking for one keyword will produce different traffic, both in numbers and relevance.

What is Your Industry Worth?
Some industries get a huge amount of traffic while others can produce only a fraction of that.

What is Your Profit Margin Worth?
Profit margins are a huge factor in the value of a ranking. Search volume can be low for your industry or keywords, but if you are in an industry with a high profit margin it doesn’t take much to succeed.

What is a Search Position Worth?
The position you get in the search results can matter a great deal.

What is Localisation & Personalisation Worth?
Search engines continually look for ways to provide more relevant results to the user. This is both good and bad to the business because what is more relevant for one is not as relevant for the other.

So what is a top ranking worth? – it just simply depends. It is important to understand that search engine rankings are merely a single measure of success, not success in themselves. You can do a lot by focusing on other more traditional marketing aspects of your site such as usability, conversion improvement than top rankings alone.

Welcome to ONLINE MARKETING Australia !!!

We are VERY pleased to announce the launch of the New ONLINE MARKETING Australia website & Blog.

ONLINE MARKETING Australia provides a range of service to business owners – covering the online promotion and marketing of their business. These services include (but are not limited to) :

  • Pay Per Click Advertising
  • Paid Inclusion
  • Email marketing
  • Banner Ads
  • Online Press Releases
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Interative Advertising
  • Social Marketing
  • Viral Marketing