Do you want to?

• Get every single update on your website or social media site into google without fail
• Improve your rankings in Google
• Get twice as many readers for every update you put on your website or social media site.
• Get better fuel efficiency for your marketing efforts.
• Create instant visibility and noise.

Maybe you need RSS!

“What is RSS I hear you cry?”

Better known as ‘Really Simple Syndication’, you can think of RSS as a type of  information pipe. It takes any information you put into the web and spreads it around. For example you update Facebook and RSS information pipe will update your website. Or you update your website and the RSS information pipe will update Google for you. So you post one update and you get 10 times the impact: because your one update will be repeated over and over again across hundreds, or even thousands of other locations on the internet. This saves you time and effort, while improving the effect of your marketing messages to reach your target audience.

1 update, 10 times the impact!

This is also a long term strategy. Set this up once, and it will keep working forever. Free advertising, spreading your message around the internet, and it only gets bigger over time. The more people connect with your RSS feed, and the more places you submit your RSS feed the more noise each of your company updates will make on the web.

A long term strategy. Set this up once, and it will keep working forever!

Below is a diagram which describes it a bit better:

Setting up RSS is easy:

Here are 5 secret steps to use RSS:

1. Add an RSS feed to your update page (e.g. your blog, your homepage, your facebook page). And remember to add an RSS subscribe button on your website.
2. Run that RSS feed through feedburner to track your statistics on how much effect the rss amplifier is having for each of your updates.
3. Link the RSS feed to each of your publishing channels (Your blog, your twitter account)
4. Submit your RSS feed to search engines and aggregators so that every update goes out across the blogosphere.
5. Use an automated software to keep submitting your RSS feed to any internet service it can find

Or we can do all of this for you for the one time low price of  €59 per RSS feed..

Contact us now and get a free 15 minute consultation on marketing your business…

The best way to get your custom website designed is to take some time and plan it. Use some of the principles below to plan your website:

What do you want to achieve? In a very real way your website is a unique expression of who and what you do, not just an accessory but a full on show of who you are and what you do. Include a mission statement on your home page. Think about your colours, think about your imagery. Write out lists of things which appeal to you, people that inspire you; this may sound silly but it can have a profound effect on your website visioning. Create a vision board to keep all these ideas together.

Who do you want to target? You need to narrow down your target market for your website, even if it is not a business website you still need to figure out exactly who is going to be looking at the website. This is important because otherwise people will not be interested in what they see on your website. Start by thinking exactly who you are not targeting. Try to cut half the people out of the world in a single statement, then cut the new group of people in half again. Keep going until you can’t thing of anything else. This group of people is your market. For example, we are looking at fishing (about half the world), in ireland (about half of ireland), sea fishing (about half of fishermen), interested in catching Bass. Now you have a niche group who you can start to visualise in your own mind.

What are your principles and values? Figure out what you want to get across on your website. This final point is important because you want to make sure you imprint yourself onto your website. Everything should be perfectly finished to encompass your message. What ever you want to communicate or sell to your visitors it should come across effortlessly. Giving a visitor a distinct impression of your brand, and carrying them through each stage of your marketing process. The homepage should lead to an offer page should lead to a contact page should lead to a sharing page should lead to a response page. Even better if you can provide near instant responses to issues.

There are certain tips which can be used to make your website look more professional and fascinating. Using these tips will assure great impressions for the first visitors. Just looking into a webpage and thinking to design like it yourself would not be an easy task if you are not familiar with website design and complexity.

Fast Loading web site designs

You may design a web site that looks fantastic but few people are going to visit it if it takes a long time to load. Your designs should be optimized for the web and should not take more than 15 seconds to load otherwise it will be highly neglected by web users.

Clear Navigation

Your website must have clear navigation once user has been entered in it. To do this you need to have clear navigation and make sure your links are at the important places. Preferably right at the top where the visitors usually watch them and try to link as many of pages to your site.

Browser Compatibility

Make sure your website looks good and work properly in all internet presently working like netscape, Mozilla firefox, Safari along with opera and Google Chrome.

Readabale and professional looking fonts

Using pink and bright colors or more darker contrasts will make website unable to read easily by the visitors. mic Sans and other fancy fonts that may not be available on most computers.

Check broken links and avoid images

Minimine the use of Images because simple designs are more attractive looking.  Minimize use of too much graphics and white space on your webpage. Check for Broken Links, you can check these using Dreamviewer and right click on any file to check whether its broken or not .

A quick guide to lead you through the sometimes difficult process of choosing a webdesigner.

1. Plan – before you get going make sure that you have talked to all the important people in your business. If you are a small operation its good to consult the wife/husband because they usually have some great ideas. Pencil your ideas onto a bit of paper. Think about what the website is going to do for your, why do you want a website: usually its because there is another business in your industry who already got one, and now you are jealous (at least of how successful it is working out for them).

2. Experience – the next step is to ask around for a good web designer. Personal referrals will always give you better options than a wide scale search of newspapers and the internet. When you make contact with the designer don’t look for a huge corporation but rather look to see what their portfolio looks like and check previous clients for references. There is a caveat, web designers who have got stuck in web 1.0 (read 1990′s) technology can be unaware of the latest developments such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Services. It is important to check that some of the previous websites in their portfolio have facebook, or twitter available on the sidebar content.

3. Customer Service – Make sure you speak with the designer on the phone, they should make you feel comfortable and be ready to lead you through the process of webdesign. Although it is not usually necessary to meet with your webdesigner, it is important to stay in constant contact throughout the design process. Also make sure that the Web designer is prepared to fix all problems which may occur after the completion of the project. A good rule is fix it if its broken pay for it if its new development; no different to any warranty on any other product.

4. Cost – cost is a difficult one, often a ‘how long is a piece of string’ question. You could pay €10,000 for the complete website experience, but if you are a small concern its more reasonable to pay under €1000 for a contract. Set a maximum budget for your marketing make sure to factor in your funding, grant, and investment proposals. Then specify the minimum requirements for your website: facebook integration, a newsletter system, content management system etc.  Then get some quotes that meet the minimum requirements. Sometimes this can be a bit catch 22 because you don’t know what you want until you see it. But a website design service which has a clear pricing structure will help you to figure out your costs more easily, so look for companies which provide up front prices.

5. Act – this seems simple, but the quicker you get something, anything at all up onto the internet, the better it is for your business. Many people wait far too long for the perfect moment to launch their website. You can always have an official launch later. You can always revise the website, hell you should revise your website. The beauty of the internet is that there is not any physical cost in changing your website (and thats why you should make sure that you have a content management system).

A few notes for when you are assessing a website designer. Now days most of the web is built on standardised platforms which have proven themselves to be the best at what they do. It is dangerous to trust a web designer who claims to have built a system completely from scratch when there already perfectly good systems which have been completely tested. Here is a list of the best platforms for each aspect of your internet marketing:

• Content Management of websites – wordpress/joomla
• Hosting – Dedicated or bluehost/hostgator
• Newsletter Systems – Aweber

Here is an introduction to twitter for small business and professional users.

Here is quick explanation on how facebook can be used for your everyday business or sole professional.

Website design in Ireland is a complicated industry with lots of different companies offering the same products. Over the course of the next few weeks I will be updating this post with my thoughts on the best and the rest in the current industry.

Noble samurai the company behind Market Samurai (the all inclusive internet marketing tool that all professionals use). Has just released some brilliant videos to help with internet marketing.

This is very relevant to all small businesses trying to make a mark on the internet…

http://www.noblesamurai.com/as/video/2

This 2 min video will show you how to enable PDT in Paypal. This will allow a programmer to setup a receipt system, and also start tracking the keywords which are making the most sales for you through Paypal.

The following is a video for Google Places. This tool will allow you to register your business officially with Google, and subsequently get some cool listing options, like a map pin in the google maps when ever someone searches for a term linked to your business.

The Video is about 5 minutes long. Make sure to watch the final 2 minutes where I talk about how to edit a google places account which has already been set up, which may be relevant to you if you are one of my clients.

This video introduces webmaster tools which is a fantastic tool for measuring your placement in the search engine results (also known as SERP’s). It is also useful for getting your websites into the search engines in the first place. Its not long, but you may need the expertise of a web designer to help you install webmaster tools. Its well worth the effort, and if you have any questions you can always contact me, or leave a comment below.

I am afraid I haven’t made this video yet, please check back in about 48 hours.

I just created a video tutorial on how to integrate pop3 with gmail.

After much discussion with my father who is an old school salesman, we have worked our way around the fundamental question ‘Where is the future in Internet Marketing?’ and I have come up with the following brainstormed ideas:

• Information is quickly becoming easier and easier to access, so the future for information products is not what you can sell but what you can give away and the best value each knowledge worker can give. This will include much IP such as music, film, literature.
• BUT as early experimenters such as 9 inch nails have demonstrated this does not remove commercial viability from these information products. The solution is to charge a premium for premium presentation. For example you sell the Deluxe version of your information product with a members area, or a special dvd delivery. People who have the money to spend will delight in the special feeling of having the premium version of your product. The information is the same, it is just improved presentation and customer care.
• It will also remain obvious to pay for genuine overheads such as production costs etc. But modern net generation individuals will not be easily duped by excessive charges for infrastructure costs they know are practically minimal.
• People want to deal with people. This means using crms such as Infusionsoft, but using them with humanity. Keeping the soul of customer care intact by building genuine relationships where the customer knows you (or individuals with in your company) to be people of integrity. This means communicating and following up on a regular basis.

I was recently challenged over the effectiveness of wordpress compared to other content management systems such as joomla. So here is a link to a fantastic article laying out some of the benefits of WordPress.

http://blairwilliams.com/5-reasons-why-wordpress-websites-are-better/

This is not to say that other CMS do not have their own benefits, but for the easiest and most versatile one stop shop for all speedy website solutions I go to wordpress.

Something that all web developers quickly encounter is the problem of a website looking different on different computers. First you have either Mac or PC which will display your website in slightly different ways. Next you have the major 4 browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari. You can go to the W3C to check the current statistics of usage for each browsers . These browsers can all display your website in different ways depending on how compliant they are with international standards. Finally there are also approximately 5 – 10 versions of each browser, each of which can have its own kinks. This creates over 50 different combinations which need to be tested.

Most trying of all however, is Internet Explorer. This little baby is definitley a trouble child, and whenever you hear of a problem 9 times out of 10 it is this browser that is giving trouble. The following are some preventative measures which should always be taken if you want to stop problems across different computers:

• Make your website W3C Code compliant – you can use their online code checker.
• Use CSS and “div” tags to construct your website. (if you use wordpress like me then you need to factor this into your choice of templates).
• Try not to re-engineer old websites it will only give you problems as the code one developer or team created will be difficult for a new developer to cleanly change. If possible just employ a developer to redesign from scratch.