SEOBook: Highly recommended
I’m a really good SEO. I run my own SEO company and we’ve had some amazing results with clients over the past couple of years.
It’s taken me many years to get to this level and I’ve learned it all by watching other people, reading blogs, forums and looking at untold amount of search results and websites! And for sure, I’ve gone down man, many wrong paths and wasted hours, days and weeks on stuff that was totally wrong and based on some seriously wrong advice that I’d picked up!
However, one place that has always given excellent advice had been the SEOBook website.
Ignore the name – it’s not a book. It used to be, but now it’s grown into a massive private community with lots of great SEOs including perhaps the best known of them all – Aaron Wall. As well as great articles, videos and walkthroughs there is a fantastic forum where you can ask questions and get excellent advice back from these guys and girls.
If you want to know the cutting edge stuff that’s going on in the SEO and learn how to apply it to your own website then you really MUST become a member!
I’ve never EVER recommended a programme that you have to pay for but this is the one programme that I would recommend.
If you want a website to rank highly and you don’t want to pay tens of thousands of pounds or dollars then you have two choices:
1 – Do it yourself by spending thousands of hours on blogs and forums, making lots of mistakes and doing things that have never worked since 2001, OR
2- Join SEOBook and get advice, guidance and expert tips from some of the best guys in the world.
Really, you only have one choice: join up with SEOBook!
Click here to find out more and to get some free tasters.
How to grow your Twitter network
I’ve been using Twitter heavily over the past month (5500 followers and counting!). I would like to share with you some of the things I do to grow my network and (just as important) to retain the people that I have in my network already.
Share interesting pieces of information
If I’m reading a particularly interesting blog post or news story then I will tweet the URL. Not only am I helping my followers by giving them some useful info but I’m also helping the author of the blog. If I’m lucky then I may even end up with them following ME and tweeting MY blog posts to their followers. If they have many thousands followers then I’ll attract new followers and website hits.
I also encourage people to ask me questions about search engine optimisation and website marketing. Not only does it help them but it gives me an excuse to show what I an expert I am in front of 5000 people. If the advice that I give is particularly useful then my followers may re-tweet it to their followers, who may then follow me.
Interact with my followers
I often ask my followers questions. There are a few reasons for this. It nearly always gets a discussion going and gives me things to tweet about. And often people are just looking for a reason to start tweeting but don’t necessarily have something to say – me asking them a question gives them a reason to tweet.
Finally, I love to hear from people that are following me – they often have great insights and great stories to share, so I generally always get something beneficial from it.
Interact with the people I’m following
As well as asking people questions I’ll often respond to other people’s tweets. I follow people with similar interests so I nearly always have something to say. By having a dialogue with people (regardless of who they are) I have learned loads, acquired new followers and even won a stack of new business!
Really, the key thing about Twitter is to interact with people. Don’t worry about the ‘big’ names on Twitter – if you can build your own large network of people that like what YOU are doing then you can start to enjoy the benefits of a large Twitter network.
If you want to join the fun then follow me on Twitter!
How to get the most from Twitter
How to get the most from Twitter
One of the things I’m often asked about is how to actually use Twitter. I’ve written a post about this before, but this time I thought I’d ask my followers on Twitter for their best experiences.
The two questions I asked were:
What’s your one best piece of advice for success on Twitter?
and
How do you make the most of Twitter?
I also promised to put the results on my blog - I’ll tell you why at the bottom of this post.
The results
Here are the tweets that I’ve received so far:
@Bikini_beat - ”Mine is to actually have fun with it rather than treating it as an item on your to-do list… what a concept!” - http://www.bikinibeat.org/
@savamaloy - ”if your photo is of a scantily clad young girl and you list ‘modelling’ among your interests, you’ll get more followers!” - http://www.piggynap.com/
@Tocquigny - ”Success on Twitter is based on knowing who is following you” - http://www.tocquigny.com/
@Rusty44 - ”Interact with your followers” - http://www.riddenhard.us/
@blogdesigner - “I use twitter to build a network of voices and belong to a wonderful tribe of people and we help echo our voices to a larger mass” - http://www.blogthememachine.com/
@HollowMarkeD – “follow interesting folks and don’t be afraid to prune out noise” - http://www.guava.co.uk/
@icasimpan – “Never use twitterfeed specially if your feed gets updated with several posts at a time as it would be like sending spam” - http://www.buggedtech.com/
SociableBlog also provided two relevant links about how Twitter
@sociableblog – “Dell to Use Twitter for Global Mobility & why twitter needs multimedia”
Quite a lot of advice there – some of it I don’t necessarily think would work for me but it’s great to get a mixture of feedback.
For me, the best advice there is to interact with your followers. This whole post came about thanks to interacting with my followers. I also said that I would provide a link to their website because it gives people an incentive to respond as well. And I’m a great believer in sharing links – see this article to see why.
Advertise your website – for FREE! Tip #3
In the first part of this series we looked at email signatures and how important it was to have your website address listed prominently in it. And in the second part we looked at various online ways to draw attention to your website.
In this third part, we’re going to look at the various things you can do offline to publicise your website. I’m actually an online website marketing expert but there is some overlap – the main aim is to get your website address in front of as many people as possible and encourage them to visit your site.
Online or offline, the same rules apply – you have to give people a reason to come and look at your website. In fact, with offline you have to be even more persuasive because rather than asking someone to just click a link, you’re asking them to go fire up their computer and then type in your URL.
This brings me to another point – make sure that your URL is memorable. Now I don’t know if this image is fake or not – but if it’s real then I am astonished! Please, whatever you do, don’t publicise a URL like this!
So, what can I do?
Do you have your website address on:
- Your company stationery?
- Any vehicles that your company has?
- Your office signs?
- Any merchandise that you produce?
- All of your promotional literature?
Wait a minute, I’m doing all of this stuff.
OK, most of the things above are pretty obvious. But remember what I said – you have to give people a reason to come to your website. So just having a web address hidden away at the bottom of your flyers isn’t good enough – very few people are going to be inspired by a link.
Instead of having a web address on your flyers, you should have a web address with an invitation to the reader:
“http://www.yoursite.com – take part in our fiendish quiz and win a free marketing consultation”
“http://www.yoursite.com – use code ‘XXYY’ to get a 10% discount on our services”
All of a sudden there is a reason to go to your website, and if your website is good enough then you’ll be marketing to them whilst their on the site, doing the quiz or whatever.
The same goes for your company vehicles. If you click this image then you go to a Flickr site where people are discussing Calmac ferries and the fact that they have a giant link on the side of their boat.
There’s some easy free publicity for them. You can do the same. Why not be creative with your links on your company vehicles? Instead of just having a plain old URL on your vehicle you could have a question:
“Want to know more about me and what I’m doing in my van? Visit our site at http://www…..”
That should be enough to pique the interest of a few motorists!
I don’t have a company van…
OK, but do you drive to the office each day? If so, do you have your URL on your car?
No? Why not?
You may pass thousands of people each day going to and from your work – why not try to market to them while you’re driving. You probably see the same faces each day and you’ll have a captive audience -if you flash your URL at them often enough then curiosity is going to get the better of them!
OK, I get the point!
What I’m getting at is that you can always improve your online and your offline marketing! Take a little bit of time and look at what opportunities you have to publicise your website, and then look at whether you’re making the most of them.
I’ll bet that you can definitely improve them!
