Vanilla or lime? Does your site have flavour??

Karen    Populating your site     content, flavour, fresh, inspiration, personality, site content, website

When you are creating a website you want people to come back to over and over again … and a site you want people to recommend to others, it is important that it has depth and  flavour.

The interwebs are full of vanilla sites that are little more than online brochures, they have no depth, no personality – no real reason for people to want to come back again. read more

a really good day in SEM is

Karen    Uncategorized    

when all your stats come up roses!

read more

when the going gets tough … how to combat the current recession

Karen    Populating your site     authenticity, connection, online marketing, recession

The tough turn to the internet.

(or Batman and Superman)

Right?

Well that seems to be the trend, as things get tougher out there for the traditional marketing media of print, television and radio, internet spending is increasing, and the expectations of what the net can deliver are getting higher. read more

Angry chickens?

Karen    Telling stories     chickens

Nothing like a bit of fowl language, right? Lol. There is a bit of a bird related theme coming through here, but when I saw this signage at the local farmer’s market the other day, just couldn’t resist.

And what is my point?

Never let a chance go by? Laugh a little?

Use what is going on in your life to illustrate content in your blog or on your website. read more

time to go fishing? – exploring link bait

Karen    Attracting link love     awesome content, linkbait, SEO

Yeah, so it’s the season to head into the wilds for a spot of fishing … the whitebait are running and I am guessing their bigger cousins, the salmon are probably out there feeling frisky too.

So what do you need for a good day out on the water? read more

how do you interact with pictures?

Karen    Populating your site, Telling stories     authenticity, awesome content, connection, customer stories, message boards, personal

You’ve all seen them – those great looking sites … probably made in Flash, with cool whizzy animations, dramatic graphics, all the funky stuff.

And we all know that sometimes images can be a lot more powerful than words.

Except, you can’t interact with them (unless of course your images are moving, and it’s an embedded YouTube vid or a Ustream live feed). read more

would you watch an advert only channel?

Karen    Uncategorized     advertising channel

Here’s a thought that popped into my head during a presentation the other day (I was listening, not presenting) … how paradigm shifting would it be if we put all the tv adverts on their own special channel?

So I did a little research and apparently a woman in the UK did exactly that – launched an advert only channel in 2004. Which seems to have disappeared with little trace and a placeholder website using her domain name.

Does that mean this is an idea with little merit? Or perhaps just that her timing was wrong … or the facts that she was under-resourced and had no television experience might have had something to do with it.

Why do I think it could be a good idea in the current environment? Because television channels are struggling to sell advertising space, devices like Tivo and MySky are making it a breeze to never watch another tv ad again … and yet there is a huge creative industry that is vested in making advertising.

Some of it now shows on YouTube of course … and the creatives get to make longer and more subtle ads in the hopes of them going viral. So perhaps there is a place to air the best of what is made – and a chance for us to view them in high-res, without waiting for endless buffering before we can appreciate the work that has gone into each one.

What I am thinking is, how many of our movie makers/directors/camera peeps etc etc got their starts making ads for the telly?? Many many I am sure, to say nothing of the employment and experience it provides for our actors who are struggling to make a living.

So if pay-TV is the model that is making money, while free to air is losing revenue on a daily basis … where to from here?

Of course, an advert only channel could also show those compilation programmes with the best of international advertising humour etc … there is plenty of scope to create interesting viewing.

Love to hear what you think- does this idea have legs in 2009??

Please comment below.

cheers

Karen

Fresh is best – 5 reasons to update your site content right now!

Karen    Populating your site     fresh, site content, update

fresh green

Sometimes we need to state what to many might seem like the screamingly obvious – your website is NOT a brochure. Please don’t just “set and forget” and expect it to provide any kind of return on the investment you have placed in getting it up and running.

Fresh is definitely best – best for your readers – old and new, and best for those lovely search engines who are constantly seeking out new material.

So the five reasons to update your site right now?

1) To show the world you are alive! First and foremost, people want to know what is going on with you and your website is your shopfront, your window to the world. If nothing is happening on your site, and nothing ever changes, then viewers might just infer that you are not updating anything because nothing is happening in your business (or if it’s a blog, your life) – you have nothing new to say. In reality, you might be way too busy to update your site – if that’s the case, please make the effort to just freshen it in the obvious places on a regular basis.

2) They won’t come back. If people make the effort to come back a few times to see what is up with you, and nothing is different, then chances are they won’t bother coming back again – so you’ve lost them.

3) You’ll lose business to your competition. If they see nothing happening on your site, visitors might also conclude that perhaps you are no longer in business, and if they are potential customers wanting to buy a product, or comission your services, then they are very likely to move on to your competition.

4) Not updating content that is obviously out of date makes your company look incompetent. Is that the perception you want the market to have of you?

5) The search engines will start downgrading your site if there is nothing new being uploaded, particularly if your competitors with the same keywords are keeping their sites fresh and relevant.

Please remember to treat your site as a constantly evolving, incredibly powerful tool – you really need to view it as something very different from every other piece of marketing collateral you have ever developed. It can be as dynamic, flexible, exciting, innovative and interactive as you want it to be – all you have to do is ask, the technology is at our fingertips like never before.

Looking forward to some juicy freshness from you now…

Karen

P.S. do you like my garden??

your site feel like a ghost town?

Karen    Populating your site, Telling stories     case studies, customer stories, testimonials, trip advisor, widgets

Can you almost hear wind whistling through the unpopulated streets?

When you set it up, perhaps the pressure was on to simply get something on line, and you didn’t really have any client stories or depth of content to load anyway?

Ok. I mentioned in the tangerine skies post about how you can build content like press releases to make your company look established – even when your business is new or newish. read more

rsvp … please?

Karen    Building trust     communicate, information overload, respond

Répondez s’il vous plaît – yeah, that’s right – respond.

All too often in the information-overloaded world we live in – full of twatterbleeping, facebooking, beebopping, txting, online chatting and emailing messages – to say nothing of the more old fashioned forms of communication (like phone calls and face to face meetings), common courtesy appears to be lost.

What am I on about? Well, all too often, people get caught up in the overwhelm and forget that there is an individual human being on the end of some very specific forms of communication – and sometimes that human being is very keen to hear back from you when they have made the effort to communicate.

So that might be a comment on your blog site, an enquiry through your website’s enquiry system, a request for a quote … or a job application.

How often do you hear frustration from friends, family and co-workers about not hearing back? The sheer inconvenience when not hearing back slows them down from making a decision – what product to purchase, which supplier to use, which job to take more seriously.

Unfortunately it happens all too often, and really, it’s just plain rude.

If you are overwhelmed by so many messages you can’t keep up, and you can’t work out which communication is most important – take someone on to help you, or pay a contractor, service person or professional.

Please don’t be one of those people. Make an effort to respond, even if it is purely with a quick acknowledgement that you have received the communication, in whatever form it arrives.

And then take the time to sit down and respond in more detail, in a timely manner.

Always keep in mind that someone has taken the time to write to you – do them the courtesy of making the time in return.

(And if you really, really don’t have any way of managing your communications, take down your enquiry form off your site and hide your email until you have caught up on things. Mmm, didn’t think so.)

Please.

Merci.

Karen