To start off this post I will write disclaimer – I am not a branding expert in the offline world nor do I claim to be. With that being said over the last 12 months there has been a lot of talking about branding in the online world. Particularly that Google is starting to talk about and shift towards favoring online brands in their search results rather than smaller informational-based sites. In my opinion that is where the web is shifting as to me it makes sense to rank sites that already have brand trust and authority rather than information that has been put together by a smaller untrusted site.

So a lot of people online are on the same sort of page when it comes to branding and future importance in the online and search engine world including myself, which means I started to look for more ways to brand my sites that would signal to Google and other search engines that I was indeed building a brand instead of a mini site which was geared to just making money quickly through ranking. Things I looked at were logo, network integration, site design, layout, wording within the content suggesting I was a brand…. the list could go on.

These things were all well and good, but what I was doing here was essentially taking factors that I had learnt (poorly) from offline branding and apply them online. I was totally missing the point…. An offline brand is not an online brand and that is what so many people including myself get confused with. If we take a look at the nuts and bolts of an online brand it comes down to if you remember a website and if you don’t. By this I mean would you return to a site after you had visited it once? So I came to the conclusion that the strongest way to build an online brand is to create a site that people would come back to if they wanted information/services within that niche. Too many webmasters look at building their site like this:

⇒ Get the visitor on -> monetize the visitor -> job done.

So a process where this would occur would be:

⇒ Visitor finds site via search engine -> site displays big adverts in front of visitor so visitor clicks off site and site gets paid -> job done.

While this process makes the most money in the short term it creates no brand for the website as the user is displayed information and then asked to leave. Think about it like going into the greasy kebab shop after a night out – you get what you need; its pretty poor quality and you are made to leave after you have your goods.

What a site trying to build an online brand should be doing is trying to make the visitor return to their website at a later point. The single most important way to make a visitor to return to your website at a later point is functionality!

If you think about all; the websites you visit regularly 9 times out of 10 you go back because you can do something you can’t do elsewhere (or it’s a lot easier to do there). I always pondered why certain websites that had terrible design and looked like they were from 1995 had the largest popularity and user bases – it all comes down to functionality!

I would class functionality as anything the user can do and interact with, this can include intuitive navigation and site layout, database driven searches, calculations, members areas, tools.

Specific examples of functionality would be the ability to share things with friends (Facebook), ability to have a favorite list of names (babynames.co.uk), Ability to calculate the value of gold (goldprices.org.uk) …. I could go on forever but I think you get the idea!

What I am trying to say is that if you are a business that is purely online or someone really trying to make movements in the online world a 5 page brochure site that looks kind of nice and has your contact details on it isn’t going to cut it if you want to make big progress online.

The core of building a brand online, the core of being ranked for the most competitive terms in the search engines is not to have a good “brand” message, its not to have a snazzy logo or to have a friendly person pop up and talk about how to navigate a website. The key to having a strong brand and strong rankings online it to have functionality that MAKES the user notice you and want to come back, something they can interact with, something they can sink their teeth into.

The strongest single signal to Google that you are a brand for your given niche is people returning to your site over and over through their search engine – you would be surprised how many people will type in www.website.co.uk into Google search to get back to their favorite site….

I buy and develop sites full time and a lot of people always ask my about building, marketing and monetizing (my mum REALLY doesn’t get it). Important I have two sides to my business, smaller sites and larger sites. When it comes to larger sites I normally give quite general answers that they really don’t understand so I thought I would make a post talking about specifics in my budget when I am building a new site and my expectations from building the site. It’s important to note that when I started online I would work with a lot lower budgets and cut corners where I could and I had great success.

So lets get started, I will typically pay around £10k for a domain name to build on. I have had the pleasure of developing on more expensive domains like Gold.co.uk (about to go live) and Pregnancy.co.uk (soft launched) but as a rough guide line I will try to build a domain that is worth around £10k in my head. I am a BIG domain snob but it has worked out really well for me – if I build on a domain that is worth £10k its not a huge risk because I can always get that money back if worst comes to worst! Domains I will go after will be brandable one to two word generics (I know that is a contradiction but I am talking about domains like mobileinsurance.co.uk, pregnancy.co.uk, babynames.co.uk)

So we have our domain and that is most likely the biggest chunk out of our budget spent – but like I said it is an asset that we can get our money back for if worst comes to worst. Next I plan out the site design and content – this is a lot of my time and no real cost is attached. Obviously this will change from site to site depending on the niche but I will map out roughly 200+ articles on the niche, organize and categorize how I want the content and get a general feel for what the site will provide. My Category structure typically looks like this

3-5 main categories -> 6ish sub categories in each category -> 6 articles minimum in each sub category

This content map is the most important thing when it comes to building the site – the structure has to make sense in order for a user to be able to navigate properly. My main concern when I am building a site is the user first and then monetization second. Content on its own will normally take me either 2-3 days of solid work or 7 days on and off.

Now we have our categories and way the site will be used its time to send the brief over to the designers.

Design will typically cost me around £1,000 – £2,000 and a few hours of my time for revisions and comments – bare in mind I am only paying for a design here and not coding (imagine buying a poster design that looked like a webpage, it doesn’t actually work but it’s a nice picture to look at).

After the design is done, and I am happy with it its now time to get it coded into a working functioning website. I will send that over to our company coder who is in house so it’s hard to put a price on his work. Lets say the it takes him about 50 hours to code the whole design and functionality into a CMS, a typical coding firm will charge around £30 per hour so to someone on the outside it would cost them about £1500 to get coded.

So right about the time the design is getting coded, I start to order my content. I have already mapped out my 200+ article titles so its time to get them written. I have to go through each title and write a rough description of what I want and make sure the scope of the article is not too big. I will typically want 750 words per article but won’t mind if I get a 2k+ word article as long as it reads well and is broken down. I am again a content snob – I view content as an asset to my site so I want something that engages the reader and is “sharable” with their friends. I don’t want content that is just catered towards search engine rankings as this is just a short-term boost. Good content will gain value over time so I don’t mind paying an extra buck for it. Typically I will pay around £20 per article – which works out to about £4,000 on content for my site if I get ~ 200 articles written for it.

So the site is coded, the content is done; it is now time for me to put the content live. Now without going into massive details I will have to format each category, optimize each piece of content and place all search engine factors onto the site. This is most likely going to take around 2-3 weeks of my time in full, as this is something you can’t cut corners with.

So the site is now live – it has taken around 4 weeks of work my end and £17,000 to get going. Now this post has got a lot longer than I first planned. We haven’t even got into what I pay when it comes to marketing the site and even my expectations for the website in the next 12 months (what I will say is I hope to recoup my investment in around 8 months and have a healthy profit by month 12 but I will have to break all that down!) I guess I will have to run through that in the next post ☺.

James

In the past couple of months I have been designing web applications for a project that I am working on for one of my sites. When designing a web application the process is slightly different from creating a website. For a web application I have to work with the programmer to create the functionality and then I get the design done after that. Where as when I build a website I always work with the designer first and then get the programmer to code in the functionality.

It was funny working the other way round because after I had finished with the programmer I essentially had something that worked… I could put in what I wanted and it did its jobs nicely. I knew that when I designed the tool the functionality wouldn’t change and the tool would work EXACTLY the same way. The changes that were due to be made would be purely superficial and arguably not add anything of value.

This had never occurred to me when working with websites. It just seemed like the thing I needed to get done first in order to develop the site. But having done things in the reverse order with the web application, I began to wonder if I had been wasting my time and if I really needed an insane design to accompany the functionality.

Now let me start with saying, if it was just me using the application I don’t think I would get it designed. It is just a sunk cost that I personally don’t need. I also came to the conclusion that I feel like functionality is more important than design (Sorry web design firms everywhere!). Perfect functionality will trump perfect design any day. However, as this was to go to a mass market I came to the conclusion that design was essential and here’s why…

Branding – Pretty obvious right? A good design gives the right impression to your customers. It shows that you care enough about your website/application to make it look good. It might seem kind of of a generic reason but I feel like it is probably the most significant benefit of design.

User Experience – User experience is becoming more important than ever. I often make the mistake of becoming so involved with projects that I forget how they look to an outside user. This means that when I give a friend a chance to use one my creations they have no idea where to start. Design, especially if done right with Ajax, aids the flow of functionality by breaking down otherwise much large steps.

I also think design allows you to lay out your website in a way that a user can navigate easily. You don’t realize how much your surfing habits are molded by what you expect to see when you hit a website. For instance an “add to checkout” button directly below the price of the product is a MUST because people are so used to this when using large shops such as Amazon.

Link-ability – As we all know, getting links to your website is critical if you ever want it to be seen. A natural link is far better than one that has been built artificially, so having a website that is linkable is very important. A well designed/well laid out website is far more likely to acquire links than a badly designed one because people want to share it with their friends. After all link-ability is really only a measure of how popular a website is right? And with SEO being increasingly influenced by social signals, a site that has considered its user experience is always going to get shared more via the likes of Facebook and Twitter, and I think this trend will only grow with the launch of Google’s social media platform Google+.

So, in conclusion, yes we need design. Probably more than ever! But it is not for us, it is for the user. And if it is to serve its purpose then we have to stop looking at it through our own eyes and take an outside perspective. Only then can it truly build on the value offered by the underlying functionality.

JMac

Podcast by The SME Marketing Compnay

Plus one button:

The Plus One button  will come up next to search results and has begun to appear within the last few days. However it is only visible to about 2% of users but you can force it to appear in your results by going to ‘Google experimental’. The Plus One button allows you to share with your search network those search results that are of a particularly high quality.

A bit like the Facebook ‘like’ button, you can ‘Plus One’ a page and then your contacts can see that you have done this. They will then know that the page is of interest and worth looking at. It is thought that this may affect search results in the future. The only issue at the moment is that there isn’t much incentive to ‘Plus One’ a result. However things may change in the future as many internet users do like to broadcast their likes and interests to anyone and everyone.

LinkedIn:

Releasing a new feature ‘apply with LinkedIn’. A tool on your profile which allows you to apply for jobs.

Google:

Google CEO admitted he made an error by underestimating the threat that Facebook posed to Google. It is thought that Facebook paid a PR company to run ‘stories’ on Google to damage their PR

Mac Theft:

A Californian man recently had his MacBook stolen. Luckily he had previously installed an app called Hidden? Which allows the owner to take pictures remotely when you are not there. He set up a blog and posted images of the thief. This went viral. The police have now apprehended the thief.

http://thisguyhasmymacbook.tumblr.com/

The future of link building:

Are links going to get weaker as a signal in the search engines? Is this happening now or in the future? The primary factor up until now which has been used to determine the rankings was the amount and quality of the links pointing to the website in question. The web is a giant popularity contest. If other websites link to your site then Google reflects this in your ranking. Will social signals become more important? There is a lot of buzz about social media affecting your rankings. There is much debate over this at the moment, does it or doesn’t it? Should SEO people spend time on social media sites to help their rankings?

Social media will become a much more important factor. Whether or not it affects the ranking you should be using social media anyway. Start using social traffic, put ‘like’ buttons on your site, make a fan page etc. and this will help your traffic. However, don’t waste a huge amount of time on it. Find out on which social networks your target audience are active. Social media isn’t free as you do have to spend time over it. A lot of the time it’s success depends on who is actually implementing your social media campaign. Social media influence will not replace links but will increase in significance. A link from a high profile site will remain important but low quality linking strategies will phase out. Linking will always be important as long as its valid but linking is low quality and open to manipulation.

Interview:

With Adam, aged 22, who runs his own on-line business.

James: Hi Adam, tell us a bit about yourself.

Adam: Iv’e been involved in internet marketing now for 1 year. My business is based on an affiliate model. I get paid for referring customers to online merchants. It started at the end of 2009, but I committed full time once I finished Uni in 2012. I specialise in the area of gambling but am starting now to get into the areas of finance and precious metals.

James: Tell us what you consider as your greatest success.

Adam: Going from zero income to £35,000 passive income a year. A website I bought for £200 that was under monetised did quite well. I added some content and calls to action and that now yields £300 per month. Learning all technical stuff like DNS was hard work but worth it. How to install wordpress, using FTP clients and all that kind of stuff I found difficult but am glad I preserved.

James: Tell us what you consider as your biggest failure.

Adam: Getting websites penalised. This is when your ranking drop from google and you loose your traffic. All of your time and effort is wasted, you don’t know what you did wrong or when your website will come back.

Dan: What lessons did you draw from this?

Adam: To be honest as you never know exactly what it is you have done wrong it is hard say. Obviously if you get a whole bunch of sites penalised after you have built or bought links then its easier to pinpoint what went wrong and avoid it in the future.

James: What sort of steps have you taken to future proof your business?

Adam: I don’t think that you can. You can minimise the risk. Build high quality sites and get high quality writers and content. The kind of content that is worth users coming back for. Build sites on more value like James mentioned in his last post. I am trying to move away from exact match domians with mini-sites and build brandable authority sites that have much more content and high user value. Google said in recent guilelines that they don’t consider affiliate sites very user friendly. You have got to add value. The main thing is adding better quality content and regular news posts. I am also always looking to learn new skills like ppc, ad words, improve sales experience etc.

James: Have you explored any social media platforms for your site?

Adam: Sometimes it is not appropriate, especially if you have mini-sites as you are never going to build up a great following. Whenyou have 15 sites like I do you can’t really spend that much time and energy on Twitter, Flickr etc. If you have a focused stragey for one or two sites then that is fine but when you have a number of sites its practically impossible.

James: Thanks Adam!

Visit Adams site : http://www.ukpokeraffilate.com

 

 

As a web developer or online marketer it can be a little frustrating to spend a lot of time on something while waiting for results. When running an online business and setting up a new website you have to sink in a lot of money into the development and initial marketing. This is something that is hard to get back if you opt to sell early on as you will find many webmasters will not recognise the value in the marketing and design. For those of you not familiar with the typical way of valuing a site – you will normally buy it based on 12-24 months revenue (given the site has been earning for 4 months plus). Due to the nature of the web it typically takes about 6 months before your site even starts to mature which means you have 6 months of sinking time and effort into a website that to the outside would will be worth very little!

This means that putting a lot of time into a site is a very daunting prospect in the short term, especially if you are not confident in your idea and you are shaky on your execution. During my time starting online businesses I’ve frequently come across this problem and it often made me struggle to focus my time on sites that weren’t earning yet. I always faced the challenge of splitting my time between long term income strategy and short term work. Over time I learnt that it is possible to recoup this cost in the value of your site, I also learnt that I would NEVER sell my sites in the first 6 months of creating them as it was never worth my time.

The trick to being able to recoup your development costs before the site starts earning is to build on value. Just like any other business, if you build on something that already has a bit of value it is a lot easier to sell and worth a lot more. Think about it like building a house in a premium piece of land in London. That plot of land is always going to hold value regardless of what you build. If you put a beautiful property on it your return on the costs of building that house is going to be a lot higher because it will be a lot more in demand when you come to sell.

If we apply this same concept to the web, the land that you are building on would be your domain name and your house would be the website you put on it. I will pretty much exclusively stay away from building on any domain name that I do not consider a premium domain because the build is a lot higher risk. I see too many online businesses building out keyword-keyword-keyword.com which is not very appealing for a buyer. For instance we bought mobileinsurance.co.uk which cost us mid £x,xxx, however this is not an issue as the domain will hold its value like the plot of land (If anything .co.uk’s are really gaining value at the moment) . We then spent mid £x,xxx sorting out the branding and ecommerce platform that it is built on i.e. put the house onto it. This took us a total of 2 months to fully sort out, along with small expenditure on content. So consider the full cost at a low £xx,xxx which is a large investment of cash as well as time spent waiting and working. The great thing about building on this domain was that we were able to entertain offers almost immediately after building, which equated to close to twice the development cost. Of course we turned them down because as a site design ages with its content it only picks up traffic and value, but keep in mind these offers were based on NO traffic and NO income from the site (plus we never planned to sell in the first place!).

This is something that I will be using for every site I develop and I have already started to redesign and write quality content for pregnancy.co.uk. Moving on from there I will be building babies.co.uk and possibly gold.co.uk. There is no secret to online business, in my opinion as long as you can put quality, thought provoking content onto a well thought out design (SEO and graphically) which is hosted on a valuable premium domain name, the website will always turn a profit no matter how far down the line you sell it.

A lot of people take their business online to help their brand, help their visibility or simply just because they feel they have to. But if we are all honest with ourselves the most important reason for the majority of us to be online is to improve our bottom line, which comes down to sales! I have been online a while, and I have come across the problem of having a great website, getting great traffic but not making enough. Now in this post I am not going to be going through improving your conversions or getting “the right” traffic. I am going to talk about how you can make a lot more out of your existing clients.

Over Deliver: Over delivering with a client is always a good move because if a customer is pleasantly surprised they will use you again and also recommend you to friends. When it comes to over delivery you don’t have to spend twice as much time on each client. You just have to change the expectations you set. For instance if you feel you can finish a project within 7 days, you should quote 14 days as your estimated time frame. Not only does that give you a lot of breathing room when you come to deliver the project but after you finished in 7 days you customer will be very happy!

Pushing Upsells – Your customers are most responsive to you once they have bought a product from you. This means it is a perfect time to sell them something else that will benefit them. You will see this happening on sites such as amazon.co.uk when they show you things you might also like to buy. Your sales process should have the product you’re trying to push alongside some recommended products that really compliment your original one. This can happen in a number of different ways, such as having a checkbox in your sales process with recommended products ticked, or just dropping them a call or an email a day later to see if there is anything you can do for them.

Small changes like this can increase your customer’s lifetime and value an absolutely huge amount. Of course by giving them up sells they are likely to get slightly disgruntled a little more, however if you over deliver it really doesn’t matter.

Watch the video to get the full scoop!

One of the things I love about marketing online is that every site and every niche is unique, meaning that a rule you apply successfully for one site may not work for another. I think one of my pet peeves is design agencies that make a website look nice without any logic behind it. For sure on the other end of the scale you have internet marketers that will simply look at raw click data and work out exactly what changes improve conversion rates without thinking about brand image. As far as I’m concerned there is a middle ground and that is where every site should aim to be. For that reason I have come up with my 5 internet marketing commandments that you should take into account before you let someone blindly design you an attractive but ultimately worthless website that looks the part but consistently fails to convert.

1) Thou shalt think about thy user.

Too many designs are from the perspective of the business owner or webmaster rather than the user. It doesn’t matter if you love the look and feel of the site, if your user doesn’t it is literally worthless. Make sure you think about how your website user can navigate around a page, what their eye is drawn to and whether or not they can find what they will typically need when they stumble across your business online.

2) Thou shalt have text

Any design agency that says you shouldn’t have text on your website is either lying to you or in the wrong industry. I hear too many design agencies talking about putting in image heavy sites with no text because they don’t want to sacrifice user quality. Even if you want your home page to be very image heavy, you can still put text below the fold. The gambling niche have actually demonstrated this very successfully. Just check out http://www.888.com/ and http://www.carbonpoker.com/. You can see that the top of the site is very much about the user and image heavy, while the bottom of the site has a bunch of great content for search engines. The consequence of this is that no aspect of the site is sacrificed. Both the user experience and the search engine rankings are optimised. Perfect!

By including relevant text, it enables search engines such as Google and Bing to read your site. It allows them to rank you for relevant terms, and ultimately bring another source of traffic to your site that will convert into business. Never shun the search engines; it is like telling someone you don’t want their business. (The optimal amount of text to have on a page is ~400 words, but that’s another post!)

3) Remember every graphic shalt impact thy visitor.

This is an important one; every design decision will have an effect on your conversion rate. You will be surprised what even discrete changes will make. For instance, a lot of people don’t know that orange buttons have a much higher conversion rate than any other button. It’s crazy just how much a change in colour can affect how much a visitors buys.

Another important consideration is borders. If you have two graphics for instance Gold and Platinum packages, and you put a border round the Platinum package it will draw more attention to it and you will increase the amount of visitors buying it.

4) Connect with thy user.

The text on your website is very important when it comes to converting your visitors. Connecting with your user enables them to feel on your wave length and become more comfortable with doing business with you. If the text on your website is very frigid and too professional you will turn people off more often than not. Try to involve them in the sales text by using “your” and “you” so they can see they feel personally involved in the process.

5) Thou shalt check thy inner pages

I cannot tell you the amount of sites that do not look at the calls to actions on their inner pages. A strong landing page is good (the page that your visitor lands on), however people forget that more often than not visitors will check internal pages for more information. These inner pages need to be worded and presented in a way to make it easy for a user to perform the task you want them to (buy online, call you or fill out a contact form).

Well there you have it, the 5 commandments of converting your visitors. Let me know if you enjoyed this post. I have one planned for video marketing if this goes down well J.
JMac

Building a website from scratch is a very daunting task for any individual. If you get it wrong from the start it is going to be a big pain to correct and more often than not it will hurt your rankings in the search engines. Now I am not a graphic designer so when I am designing a website I have the luxury of being able to give it to very talented graphics guys, who run with a concept and allow me to provide feedback. Most people think the design is the end of it but in reality it is just the beginning. Structuring content is more important from a search engine perspective than fancy graphics to entice visitors.

If you are building a large website you are going to have to separate your content up into main categories, sub categories, sub sub categories and so on! This can get very confusing especially if you don’t do anything visual to organise your mind. As a SEO guy I like to make sure that all my categories/subs etc relate to each other and therefore help my rankings in the search engines. For instance if I am writing about cars I might make a main category BMW, my sub category two seat BMW’s and then off that category I might link to an article on my review for a BMW Z3. The way I have laid that out makes sure I build maximum relevance to my article and I also make it very easy for the user to navigate.

The best way to do this is to make it visual so from the very beginning you can get all the right content written and this way you can know exactly where it is going to go and what pages you have to set up as it’s very hard by just doing it from memory. Whats my solution? Mind Mapping!

I use bubbl.us (Completely free) to visualise how my websites are going to turn out, check out the picture below to see it in action:

So make sure next time you are designing a site, whether it is just for fun or for your business use bubbl.us. I guarantee using this sort of method will help you rank better in the search engines as well as make the site more user friendly.

Sadly a lot of projects that I work with at The SME Marketing Company I can’t disclose. This makes sense because if I was to tell people our strategy and the sites we are working on the competition could take the same approach and we wouldn’t get the best results. Every now and then however I get the pleasure of working with a site with such scope that it doesn’t matter what I say because the competition won’t be able to copy me. This is the case with a site I am working with to develop at the moment: cheats.

Whats so special about cheats.co.uk?

In a nutshell, the domain is special about cheats. Not only has it had a site on it for 5 years now, it has been registered for 16 years and it is a 1 word very brand able domain name. All these ingredients point to the fact that if developed properly it could be an absolutely monster portal for gaming/cheats. Not only that but the website is currently getting 10,000 visitors per month and that’s in its current state (which isn’t the most ideal state!).

Where is it at right now?

Well the site like I mentioned has around 10,000 visits per month to it. It runs on a very nicely coded custom CMS which obviously took a lot of effort to create. At the moment the site makes peanuts off Adsense(Google advertising) and really isn’t living up to its potential. The site has been live for 5 years now which is definitely going to help the respect search engines have for it. All in all for what the site could be it is 100 times smaller at the moment, but that is no bad thing because the challenge is growing it! O I forgot to mention it also ranks second page in Google for the term “cheats” in the UK which will be an absolute monster when it hits the front page.

Where do I see the site going?

Well first things first, the site needs a complete facelift; at the moment though the back end system is tight its front end is kind of ugly and doesn’t make me want to stay on the site. So the first thing to look to do is a redesign.

The second is community, a site like this will be make or break depending on the community it has, we need members contributing cheats, reviews and discussion to the site to really build its brand. I will be taking a look at how we can increase the community feel with forums, moderators and volunteers.

Finally, traffic is a big issue. The site needs to be doing over 50k visitors each month at least to start to earn some decent income. The reason why a site like this needs so many visitors is because the value of each visit is quite low. Whereas other sites can do just 6k visitors each month and earn high £x,xxx . The way to build this traffic is really through securing the brand value with SEO. Moving the site onto the first page for the search term cheats will be a big help and increasing the content for more traffic will also be a big factor in doing this.

All in all I see the site being a massive success in its niche. It will definitely be a long term project however the rewards for it will be quite significant. Keep a look out on the site for changes we will be making and let me know your thoughts and opinions on it!