Top Ten Tips to Enhance Customer Service

Check out our top ten tips to enhance customer service over at Businessadvantage:

http://businessadvantage.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/top-ten-tips-to-enhance-customer-service/

Marketing is All About Frames, So Put Your Products In the Picture

Marketing is All About Frames, So Put Your Products In the Picture

Retailers suffer shoplifting surge

Retailers suffer shoplifting surge

A very happy Christmas for online retailers

A very happy Christmas for online retailers

Social Bookmarking - how can it help my business?

There has been a lot of hype surrounding social bookmarking in recent years as it gives users the opportunity to bookmark and share interesting information with friends, colleagues and acquaintances around the World.

Consequently social bookmarking has opened up scope for many businesses as it is, in essence, helping companies to generate free brand exposure as well as multiple backlinks to improve their search engine optimisation (SEO).

So I would like to take a few minutes to look at how social bookmarking can be used to full effect:

Register with some of the best known social bookmarking sites out there, such as:


Reddit

Digg

StumbleUpon

Propeller


Once you've registered with the relevant sites it is important to become a known and trusted user, this is done by:

1. Contributing content on a regular basis
2. Meeting and interacting with other site users - check out the content they're submitting and invite them to see yours as well
3. Don't solely use the Social bookmarking sites to submit your own content - this can be off-putting to other users and normally comes across as spammy
4. Encourage other users to submit your content on for you - opening up a larger, global audience
5. Submit interesting content - for example, press releases, interesting news, and videos. Try to avoid posting your homepage or product pages

Social bookmarking should be a long-term, on-going process if you are serious about developing your company image and SEO website. I am by no-means an expert and this is something I've only recently begun to look into. If you have any comments or suggestions you think would be relevant then please comment away!

Small Business Blog

With increasing worry over the impact the current economic recession is having on small businesses both in the UK and Worldwide more and more blog writers and journalists alike are focusing on how we can combat the issues facing both large and small businesses.

Recently our partner site BusinessAdvantage has posted quite a few excellent articles on a range of subjects. From Royal Mail strikes to how to start a new business or prevent job redundancies.

So if you're interested in current events affecting the small business owner, how to grow your business or if you simply want to read some entertainingly sarcastic comments then check this blog out.

More about Search Engine Optimisation

I think there are a number of key components that any SEO marketer has to consider when developing a web strategy:

1. A link building strategy. Sites that link to your website should be relevant to what you're trying to sell. For example, if you are selling and promoting unsecured loans then it makes sense to have links from other finance companies (whether they are offering payday loans, secured loans, commercial loans or simply offering financial advice). In addition to this you should consider the "Alexa" rank of any site linking to you - i.e. websites with a high Alexa rank will help to boost your position when linking to your site.
2. Press Releases. This is very important - if your company is seen to be releasing regular, relevant news with a link through to your website then this will boost search engine ranking. Check out Google News for more information.
3. RSS feeds. Ensure that any other news related articles published on the website has a method that allows people to add your feeds into their RSS readers. Many Blogs have this feature already built into them - hence why Blogs perform so well on Google and Yahoo.
4. Update your content regularly. If your site is regularly updated with new promotions, vouchers, rewards, etc then this will draw more attention to the site and allows a possibly broader demographic of customer coming to the site.
5. Meta tags. Many web designers do not fully utilise Meta tags in their HTML web source-code. Examples include SEO keywords and a Meta description. For more information on this I would advise checking out Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_element
6. Post in forums regularly - possibly looking to include your web link below the post. Not all forums will allow this (i.e. this one) but it does enhance your organic search.
7. Of course other, more obvious SEO elements, is to include headers (i.e. h1/h2/h3 titles), Page titles (i.e that appears on the browser window not on the website itself), Alt image tags (i.e. ...alt="credit cards" ).

There are other valid methods you can use to increase SEO ranking but this is really a case of trial and error. As I've said before, I'm not an expert when it comes to SEO (I'm more PPC and Email) but I've been learning an awful lot about SEO over the past few months and I want to share this with you.

I suggest trying this tool to check your website's keyword density:

Latest Marketing Projects

I know I have neglected my blog for a while but I have been taken over by priority tasks. To see my latest marketing projects please visit www.constructaquote.com and businessadvantage.wordpress.com for more information. Constructaquote is for business insurance and offers the best quotes in the industry for all areas of business insurance.
Business Advantage has been setup for people starting out in business and aims to give good advice and acts as a voice for the small business.

The Best Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

There are a number of excellent Affiliate marketing programmes I have come across over the past few months since starting down this route.

I strongly recommend the following programmes that pay out excellent commissions:

Join Solution Loans for Great Commissions!

Credit Window Launched

I'm VERY pleased to announce that my latest website is now up and running - www.creditwindow.co.uk. So if you're looking for any financial products - from unsecured and secured loans to payday loans, credit cards and pre-paid debit cards then please check out the site and see if there is anything you like. Creditwindow still requires quite a lot of attention from me but it's working to my satisfaction at the moment and I can envision it working well. Alternatively, if you're not looking for any finance products but have opinions about the site or even this blog then please feel free to leave comments below. In addition to this I would be more than willing to add any webmaster's backlinks from my site or blog as long as you'd be willing to reciprocate.