First, the Bad News About Social Media

There's a simple fact about being visible, whether as a celebrity, a politician or a business - people will talk about you.

Not only talk, of course. These days people can share their thoughts and opinions with more than a few close friends or the person next to them in the bar. Opinions these days can be shared worldwide in a moment - on Twitter, Facebook, and a hundred other 'social media' networks. Some of those networks are dedicated to discussing particular celebrities, politicians and brands.

Which means, the only way you won't be talked about is if nobody notices you, which is hardly what you want when you're in business. And that means social media isn't something you can choose to ignore.

So you have a choice when it comes to social media. You can hope it won't affect you or your company adversely (also known as 'the ostrich position') or you can embrace the potential benefits of social media, accept that it's much better to be a part of the conversation about you and actually use it to grow your business and connect to your customers.

We don't recommend the first option, and we can't help you with it (although we can help you limit the damage afterwards...) but we can certainly help you with the second. We will be as involved as you want us to be - from helping you set up your accounts, giving you some simple training and leaving you to it, to managing your whole social media campaign. We can build your Facebook Business Page and show you how to get more relevant followers on Twitter.

Probably most important of all, we will show you how to monitor and manage your reputation online, and of course we can do that for you, too.

Basically, if you're in business you WILL be online, and when it comes to all aspects of online marketing you won't anyone offering more online marketing expertise than Cinnamon Edge.

Roy

Cinnamon Edge Has Moved!

We've just moved home and office to:
 
2 Chichester Close
Bury St Edmunds
IP33 2LZ

And our new phone number: 01284 767193.

After such a quick move there was a lot of sorting out and decluttering to do. We have to thank Mark Byford and Gary Spencer of Crack on!! who supplied the van and heavy lifting on the day (seven trips!) and so it was easy to decide where all our surplus stuff would go. Mark has already been back twice with the Crack on!! van to collect for their new warehouse/shop in Thetford. 

But now Cinnamon Edge are back into the swing of things, we've almost stopped tripping over boxes, and we're ready to help you with your business' marketing just as soon as you want to call the new number!

That's 01284 767 193.

Crack On !! are Cracking On

We're pleased to have been able to help Crack On !! set up an email newsletter system today.

This means you can sign up at the Crack On !! website and receive regular coaching, motivation, encouragement and news from the Crack On !! team and their rota of coaches and motivational speakers and writers.

The first newsletters will be loaded over the next few days but you can sign up as soon as you like. Just go to www.crackon.biz !!

Roy

A Very Special and Exclusive Website Offer

If you have a website that’s ‘killing it’ in the search engine results and bringing you lots of customers or clients, you can save yourself some time and stop reading now.

If you don’t have a successful, profit-making website yet, please read on…

We recently made a very generous offer to a few select firms in and around Bury St Edmunds and it occurred to me this afternoon that there was no reason we shouldn’t make the same exclusive offer to you!

This is the offer:

A brand-new website, optimised for best search engine rankings, and all yours for a whole year, for just £1950.

That includes hosting and domain rental (the website address), design, and even search engine optimisation.

It also includes exclusivity for your business in your area.

Because we’ve included SEO we’ll also do your essential keyword research and we’ll secure you the best available domain URL (web address) for your best keyword.

To sum up: you'll have a website that will do well in the search results and should bring you more clients and pay for itself in no time, for less than two thousand pounds for a whole year.

For best results we recommend you have this new site in addition to your existing website, so that you boost the results from that website too, or you can use your new site as your main one.

At the end of the first year you can keep the site ‘live’ for another year for just £950, and we’ll guarantee that annual fee for the following year, too.

Alternatively, you can choose to own your website and address outright for less than four years' rent by paying just £4750.

It's a pretty simple offer, but as the ad says, 'Life doesn't have to be complicated'!

Email me for more information.

Roy

Google Places' Latest Guidelines

Google Places has seen some 'interesting' changes lately, as you'll see from previous posts. So here, for your information and straight from the horse's mouth, are Google's latest guidelines (read 'rules') for Google Places:

Your Google Places Account
Ownership: Only business owners or authorized representatives may verify their business listings on Google Places.

Account Email Address: Use a shared business email account, if multiple users will be updating your business listing. If possible, use an email account under your business domain. For example, if your business website is www.google.com, a matching email address would be you@google.com.

Your Business Listing
Business Name: Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world.

Do not include marketing taglines in your business name.
Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name field, unless they are part of your business name.
Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business in the business name field.

Business Location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.

Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed.
Use the precise address for the business in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
Businesses that operate in a service area, as opposed to a single location, should not create a listing for every city they service. Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.
Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the office.
Do not include information in address lines that does not pertain your business’s physical location (e.g. URLs, keywords).

Website & Phone: Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.

Use a local phone number instead of a call center number whenever possible.
Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or “refer” users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.

Categories: Provide at least one category from the suggestions provided in the form as you type. Aim for categories that are specific, but brief.

Categories should say what your business is (e.g. Hospital), not on what it does (e.g. Vaccinations) or things it sells (e.g. Sony products or printer paper). This information can be added in your description or as custom attributes.
Categories should not contain location-based information (for example, Dog Walker Los Angeles is not permitted).
Only one category is permitted per entry field. Do not “stuff” entry fields with multiple categories.

Custom Attributes & Description: Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. Learn more about acceptable custom attributes.

Other Items of Note
Ineligible Business Models: Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.
Businesses that are under construction or that have not yet opened to the public are not eligible for a listing on Google Places.
Rental properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments, are not eligible for a listing on Google Places. Create a listing for the central office that processes the rentals, rather than the individual rental properties. If you'd like, you can then add your real estate properties to Google Maps so that they are available on our Real Estate layer.

Disclaimer: Google reserves the right to suspend access to Google Places or other Google Services to individuals or businesses that violate these guidelines, and may work with law enforcement in the event that the violation is unlawful.

So there you have it. The guidelines aren't actually that complex or difficult to comply with, but we are getting reports of people adjusting their listings to meet the new guidelines and being penalised as a result - listings are being demoted or are disappearing altogether.

I suggest you stick rigidly to the new guidelines for any new listings you create (and use a new account for each listing). Meanwhile, you might want to watch and wait as we are with any existing listings - I'll let you know how that works out!

Roy

PS. There's more about Google Places Anomalies on our Marketing Manual Blog

Upping the Ante for Solicitors in Bury St Edmunds

It looks like one lucky (or farsighted) solicitors' practice in Bury St Edmunds will soon be getting the benefit of our Solicitors Bury St Edmunds website.

The benefit of a website that shows up in the first page or two of results is obvious, especially if your practice doesn't have a website at all or has one that's so well hidden it might as well not exist.

Some local firms do a great job with their websites and other online 'presence', while others don't seem to have grasped the basics. That's fine, because that's what we're here for.

Our site features on page one or two for all relevant search terms and it's top of the heap for some of them - and it's still available as I write this post...

So if you have a legal practice in Bury St Edmunds or nearby and you're not getting enquiries and clients from your website, contact us quickly and you may just be in time to get yourself a priceless place among Bury St Edmunds' highest-flying legal eagles.

We're only asking £195 per month or an amazing £1950 per year (that's two months' rental free) to get you this prized website address. There are many more people searching for a solicitor than will be looking for you by name - believe me, I've checked!

We can add your details to the existing site right away, and we can build you a site of your own if necessary (ask about prices).

But meanwhile, your practice could have a page one position today.

Roy

PS. The solicitors' website is not a thing of beauty, but it's not supposed to be. It proves the point that even an ugly site can get a good position in Google and generate enquiries and leads, as long as you know how. And we know how.

Bury St Edmunds Business Daily

If you look to the right you'll see we've added a new widget - giving you access to The Bury St Edmunds Business daily - an online newspaper publishing the best content contributed by people in and around Bury, plus a few big names from further afield.

The paper is in its early stages, but it's already generating a bit of a buzz. So far we've had two requests to be added to the list of contributors in the last 24 hours.

If you want to be included in The Bury St Edmunds Business Daily you first of all have to follow us on Twitter - you can use the button just above the widget - and then tell us you're in Bury St Edmunds (or, if not, why we should include you anyway).

Then just tweet some really interesting and useful stuff and you could make the front page!

Roy

A Little Wrinkle in Local Search

If you've ever wondered why some searches you make on Google give you local results and a map, while others don't, I'm afraid I can't really tell you, except that Google is forever trying to guess whether you want to see local results or not.

However, there are two things you can do to increase the chances of seeing a map and local business Places results. Both of them involve telling Google where you are.

Firstly, you can include your location in the search 'string', by typing in 'solicitor Bury St Edmunds' for example.

Secondly, you can tell Google your location so it assumes you want to see local results whenever you search for a service. You can occasionally do this when you do get a map, by selecting the 'change location' button if it appears.

But you can also do it another way: when you make a series of searches for services without specifying your location (this seems typically to be 5 or 6 searches), Google will eventually ask you your location in a small box at the top of the organic search results. When you type your location in here you can also ask Google (on that browser) to remember this for future searches.

From then on, you should get local search results, with a map, whenever Google detects your search is for a 'local' service (dentist, solicitor, car repairs, and so on).

It's yet another wrinkle in Google's quest to give us all what it deems to be the best possible results whenever we search its massive database.

Google isn't perfect - not by a long way - but it is very, very clever!

Roy

Another Google Change

The latest change from Google is definitely an improvement for online marketing professionals like Cinnamon Edge, even as it might seem like a slight backward step.

That's because the latest version of Google's Keyword Tool is more user-friendly and more accurate than the hotch-potch of versions they've had us put up with in recent months.

By removing search data relating to their content network and 'second tier' search engines like Ask.com and AOL, Google now gives more conservative search estimates that are more likely to reflect the results we can achieve in the real world.

And by making the interface more user-friendly - like it used to be - they've suddenly made it the best place to start your keyword research - just like the good old days.

Well done Google, we say.

Roy

PS. We're still keeping a very close eye on Google's Local Search changes and a picture is starting to emerge.

What's interesting is where Google is getting the text snippets they use in the search results. Very often in the past this was the home page description.

Now when you look at the example below it appears they're using the first few lines of text from the home page (A) OR the first few lines from an interior page (B) OR they're not including any text at all (C).

There are more changes to come as things settle down, we can all be sure of that!

NEWS RELEASE

BUSINESS OWNERS ACCEPT THE CHALLENGE IN BURY ST EDMUNDS

A select group of local business people were treated to an absorbing morning of online marketing knowhow at Cinnamon Edge’s first Challenge Workshop in Bury St Edmunds on Wednesday, in aid of St Nicholas Hospice Care.

The workshop, the first in a series planned by local marketing experts Cinnamon Edge, included priceless information on how your website can make money instead of costing you money, how to get Google to send customers straight to your door, how to totally dominate your market and how to become an ‘authority’ in your area of expertise.

Jacqui Carrel and Roy Everitt, partners at Cinnamon Edge, presented the workshop to an attentive audience, which also included representatives from Bury St Edmunds Chamber of Commerce and St Nicholas Hospice itself.

Billed as the first Challenge Workshop, it was part of the firm’s contribution to the Towergate Accumulator Challenge, through what Cinnamon Edge has dubbed ‘The Fifty Quid Challenge’.

Afterwards, attendees described the event as ‘excellent and very well presented’, ‘fantastic’ and, ‘a great training workshop’.

Roy Everitt was pleased with how it went and was especially thrilled to be able to contribute to the hospice through the Towergate Challenge.
‘We’ve been planning some workshops for local business owners for a while, and the Towergate Challenge was a great incentive to finally find the time to do it’, he said, and added, ‘We really wanted to help local businesses, but contributing to the hospice as well made it doubly worthwhile.’

Online marketing is not Jacqui and Roy’s only area of expertise but they have become known as the local specialists.

The event raised about £400 for the hospice and Cinnamon Edge are happy to accept further donations through their dedicated website www.thefiftyquidchallenge.co.uk, which will be open for the duration of the challenge and for some time afterwards.

The next workshop is planned to take place in September.

-----ENDS-----

Challenge Workshop Rescheduled

We need to confirm the exact details, but our first Challenge Workshop is now planned for week commencing 16 August.

The theme will once again be 'How to Dominate Your Market Using Tactics 99% of Business Owners Don't Know About' and the workshop will run from about 9.am to 12.30 or thereabouts.

Get more details at the Fifty Quid Challenge blog or email roy@cinnamonedge.co.uk to book your seat. Places are strictly limited for free* access to this exclusive material.

Roy

* We do ask for a donation and £50 minimum will guarantee you a place if you're in the first 12 to book. Donate more if you like - every penny will go to the hospice.

Challenge Workshops 2010

We had to postpone our workshop planned for yesterday, 16 July, but it will be rescheduled for next month, when the theme will still be dominating your market using latest strategies that 99% of your competitors know nothing about.

More details on the Fifty Quid Challenge blog.

Roy

The Importance of Link Building For Your Website

Hello again

While it’s usually very important to optimise your website for the key phrases your clients use, only part of that optimisation can take place on the website itself.

On site optimisation can also help to make PPC campaigns more cost-effective, but the most important part of search engine optimisation is incoming links from other websites. That means a link building campaign is crucially important for your website if you want people to find it on the first page or two of the search engine results.

Search engines like Google use the number and quality of inbound links to a site as an indication of the authority or value of that site. If lots of other sites link to a particular website, the theory goes, that site must be important or useful.

Also, the value of inbound links depends on the ‘authority’ of the website they come from and whether the links are ‘follow’ or ‘no follow’ links. A lot of websites that seem to offer good back-linking opportunities actually have ‘no follow’ links that don’t really add much ‘link juice’, as it’s known, to your website.

A ‘no follow’ link is one where the search engine spiders are actively instructed by the coding in the link not to follow the link (for example, to your site), so your site doesn’t gain the extra authority that inbound links would give it.

For example, links from YouTube are now mostly ‘no follow’, and most blogs and WordPress-based websites are ‘no follow’ by default.

Many people, even the website and blog owners themselves, aren’t aware of that and might offer to exchange links with you in all good faith. Others will have modified the coding of their website so that links from them are worth getting, and these are the ones you should consider getting links from.

Other good sites for linking are directories, news release and article sharing websites, some video sites, forums, and popular blogs where the links are of the ‘follow’ type. How you add your links will vary with each type of website.

Tracking down these worthwhile sites and building links from them all can be very time-consuming and even tedious, but it’s very important to the wellbeing of your own website.

Finally, remember that the search engines are trying to give human viewers the best possible experience, so to satisfy the search engines your link building strategy needs to look as natural as possible. That means you need to build links steadily and not all at once, and you need to keep building new backlinks to your site throughout its life.

Old links become ‘stale’ or even disappear as the other sites are updated, so an ongoing strategy of continuing link building and refreshment is also needed to keep your site as high in the search engine results as possible.

Roy

Are You Using Video Yet?

Hello again

While marketing principles are mostly unchanging for year after year and even decade after decade, the technology that we can use to deliver our messages to potential clients and customers is changing ever more quickly.

Right now, the medium that gets more attention from more potential clients than any other is video. Video both promotes your business and brings traffic to your website.

So are you using video yet?

There are lots of different ways to make a video for your business and getting started needn’t be as difficult as you might imagine. Companies are successfully using everything from slide shows to mini-dramas, and from interviews to how-to’s, and almost any combination of these can be used to get your marketing messages across to an audience that might otherwise be difficult to reach.

One of the strongest ways to use video is testimonials from happy customers. However well you promote your business, someone else’s words will always carry more weight. When people see video testimonials on your website they are already thinking of buying from you and wondering if they should, so a good testimonial video could well be what tips the balance in your favour.

You can also promote your good name through video by being helpful and passing on free information that might be difficult to get across in any other way.

Another type of video is the guided tour, or ‘meet the family’, where you show people your place of work and some of the happy staff. This helps people identify with your company and reassures them that you’re real human beings. People buy from people, after all.

Or you can just create slide shows, with either a voice-over or a music sound track. These can be pictures of your business premises, your products or your happy customers, or they can be instructional or educational, more like a PowerPoint presentation – or they can be a combination of these.

You can even inject a bit of humour into a potentially dull subject with a cartoon like this one:

Finally, your video could be the equivalent of a sales letter, and you could even use the sales letter for a product as your video script. This has been shown to be much more effective than a written sales letter in some instances.

Your videos only have to be a few minutes long at most, and often less than thirty seconds, and it’s better to have a number of short videos than one or two longer ones that people will be less likely to watch to the end.

But the key is to keep making new videos and adding them to video sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video, as well as to your own website and blog.

And to get started as soon as possible!

Roy

What Are They Saying About You?

Why Not Asking This Question Could Cost You Your Business

Imagine this scenario:

You run a completely honest and reputable business and you spend valuable time, effort and money promoting your business, its products and its services.

And yet, mysteriously, sales are not what you expect.

Even worse would be, while you’re doing everything you ever did, your sales are actually starting to fall and you sense that despite your best efforts, it’s your credibility that’s lacking.

In fact, when you finally ask some people why they don’t buy from you, they mutter something about ‘No smoke without fire’, or they talk about your reputation and how there is so much bad stuff written about you that some of it must be true.

Well, then you know you’re in trouble, because with all that bad publicity out there you’re suddenly fighting a rearguard action, trying to convince people you’re one of the good guys really.

But that can take months, even years, and that bad publicity might never truly go away.

Meanwhile, you’ve missed out on a load of business. You might even have gone under, and just because a few people started saying unfair things about you. When a few people start to talk about you, whatever they have to say can be all over the Internet in no time at all, especially if your name is already well known.

That’s why a reputation management strategy is so important for every business these days.

With a reputation management strategy in place you can see every time you or your business is mentioned anywhere and react accordingly. You can deal with complaints, correct errors of fact and put your side of any story. You can react to praise, too.

Without a strategy in place you’re basically gambling that no one, ever, will have a bad word to say about you or your business or even your products.

And however honest and ethical you may be, that’s a pretty unlikely scenario, isn’t it?

Reputation management doesn’t have to be about suing anyone who ever says a bad thing about you but it does pay to defend yourself against the unfair accusations that even the nicest people have levelled against them from time to time.

And sometimes you’ll even get to say ‘Thank you’.

Roy

PS. Naturally, Cinnamon Edge can help you with reputation management as well, because we do much more than just online marketing in Bury St Edmunds.

Dominate Your Market with Online Marketing

Have a look at our latest video -

Online techniques are a part of the marketing mix we will use to help YOUR business seal profit leaks, find hidden profit opportunities and make more money by spending less.

Roy

Online marketing for Bury St Edmunds from Cinnamon Edge

Page One on Google for Solicitors' Site

Here's a screenshot of Google's first page, taken today:

The first two positions are held by our Solicitors Bury St Edmunds site, while the associated blog is in sixth spot.

Just an example of the kind of thing we can do for our clients, especially with a well-chosen domain name. This particular web property (the site and domain) are for sale by negotiation.

Roy

Update on Our Google Dance

You have to love it when a plan works!

If you read the previous post you'll know we experienced a version of the 'Google Dance' with one of our client websites - Dentist Bury St Edmunds.

The site was on page two or three. Not on page one but definitely in contention.

Then, suddenly, it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't even indexed by Google, which could have been alarming. But we remembered a phenomenon that we'd witnessed once or twice before, and which some people call the 'Google Dance', where a website can simply disappear from the listings, only to reappear just as suddenly and even in a higher position than before.

And guess what? Our dentist site has done just that. Reappeared as if from nowhere, only not on page two or three, but on page one, as we hoped it would.

Result!

Roy

PS. Meanwhile, a front page site I created for local Bury St Edmunds courier company, Must Go Couriers, is still firmly parked on page one, where we left it some months ago. But now it has a Youtube video and a link directly to Must Go's official website, so they can start to reap the benefits of Cinnamon Edge's online marketing expertise.

Online Marketing Tip Helps a Bury St Edmunds Business

A recent module of our online marketing course dealt with the issue of getting indexed by Google.

Google themselves say there's little point now in submitting your site for indexing and they'll get to your site eventually. That's true, but with millions of new sites being built every month, you could be waiting a while.

One local business owner couldn't find his site on Google and wondered what was wrong. When he typed the address into the address window his site came up, no problem. But when he typed it into the search window, Google came back with 'Page not found'.

One thing you can rely on Google to do is visit established and popular sites, like social media and bookmarking sites. When they visit, they tend to follow the links. So a good way to get Google to visit your site and index it is to create backlinks from some of these sites.

I posted a link to his site Bouches Bonanza on Digg. Within an hour, Google had indexed his site. The site's not well optimised and it's not likely to reach page one, but at least you can find it now.

Roy

Online Marketing on the Move in Bury St Edmunds

One of the deciding factors in any form of marketing is access to your potential customers. There's no point taking out ads in The Times if your target audience is aged under 21 or living outside The Times' distribution area.

Likewise, you might wonder: 'What's the point of putting your business online if half the town you're based in has no useful Internet connection for days at a time, as happened in Bury St Edmunds this week?'

But to dismiss online marketing in Bury St Edmunds because the broadband proved unreliable this week would be to forget the current 'big things' in Internet marketing - mobile broadband 'dongles' and hand-held Internet-ready devices like the Blackberry, the iPhone and the rest.

Increasingly, your customers will be searching for you on the move and it's important to make your website available to them however they want to access it. But websites need to be specially redesigned to work properly on portable devices.

And optimising your site for iPhones, smart phones and other portable Internet devices is something else we can help you with, needless to say!

Another 21st Century service from Cinnamon Edge.

Roy