Traditional marketing doesn’t work. It’s expensive and ineffective. People are spending more and more time online. While you’re trying to attract new business, they’re updating their Facebook profiles, watching YouTube, reading blogs and ‘tweeting’ their every thought. As a business owner, how do you get the word out about your product or service? By going where your market is – and that is increasingly online.
Jon Reed is a social media consultant, lecturer, speaker and trainer. He previously worked in publishing for 10 years, including as publishing director for McGraw-Hill, before jumping the fence to become an author.
The starting point for your website is your design brief. You should think this through and put some ideas down on paper before contacting a designer. The questions below are what a designer will ask. And even if you’re doing it yourself, it’s still a good discipline to go through this process. It will help [...]
How to submit a podcast to iTunes
Delivering a podcast can seem dauntingly technical. But a podcast is really just a collection of audio (or video) files hosted on your blog – either a blog set up specifically for the purpose, or a discrete category called, say, ‘podcast’. The thing that transforms it from a collection of static audio files to a [...]
Why you need a business website
A website is the most important marketing tool for your business – if you do nothing else to market your business online, you absolutely must have a website. Fortunately it is much easier to establish a web presence than it used to be. There’s no need to put this off for a lack of geeky [...]
How to use three-point lighting
If microphones are essential to the quality of your podcast, lighting is essential for video. If you’re doing quick and informal clips, you may be able to get away with your handheld camera or iPhone and use the available light. I recommend the Flip or the Kodak Zi8 for this. The Zi8 even allows you to plug in [...]
How to claim a ‘vanity URL’ for your Facebook page
A relatively new innovation in Facebook is the introduction of ‘vanity’ URLs for both profiles and pages. There’s nothing terribly vain about them – it just means you can have a shorter, more meaningful, unique URL (web address) for your Facebook page than the default string of numbers.
I’ve just got one for the Facebook page [...]
How to increase your followers on Twitter
Once you’re on Twitter with a nice branded profile, tweeting appropriately and engagingly and following key people in your community, it’s time to build your followers. Why do you want to do this? Because building followers on Twitter is like building up your email list. Once you have a sizable list, you can announce your [...]
WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
WordPress is the blogging software I always recommend. It’s free, powerful, flexible and endlessly customizable.
But there are two versions – and one of the questions I’m most frequently asked is which version to choose: WordPress.com or WordPress.org? Here are the pros and cons of each to help you decide.
WordPress.com
WordPress.com is the hosted version – i.e. WordPress [...]
Five ways to increase your search engine traffic for free
If you don’t have a website, you don’t exist online. If you don’t have a search engine strategy, you exist – but you’re invisible. Fortunately, there are plenty of things you can do increase your findability by Google – and other search engines – which will boost your traffic, and won’t cost you a penny.
1. [...]
Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing – the blog!
I didn’t think I had enough blogs – so I’ve started another blog! This one is for my new book, Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing: How to use websites, blogs, social networking and much more, which is published by FT Prentice Hall in December 2010.
I delivered the manuscript a few weeks ago to my [...]
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