November 23rd, 2009 by Duane Jackson
After the Global Entrepreneurship Week launch event last Monday I went along to the IoD for the final of The Pitch. Think Dragons Den without the TV cameras.
It was an entertaining afternoon with 6 businesses pitching for a prize package worth £50,000, Anthony Lau, Founder of Cyclehoop was crowned the winner.
One thing that did worry me was the finalists response when asked about their marketing plan. For some of them their entire marketing plan could be summed up in one word: Google. “If you search for x we’re number one on Google”.
It’s something I see way too often. Relying on natural traffic from Google for your sales is a very precarious position to be in. Google can change it’s algorithm overnight and you can drop from page 1 to page 100 – effectively putting you out of business.
Whilst free traffic (as opposed to paid-for Adwords) is highly desirable – and we certainly do well from it ourselves – you should never rely on it as your primary source of new business.
If you’re ranking well now then great – but make sure you use the revenue generated by that traffic to implement a marketing plan so that you’re not so dependent on one source for your livelihood.
What’s almost as worrying is the judges apparent willingness to accept “Google” as an acceptable response to “What’s your marketing plan?”.
It isn’t.
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Tags: GEW, Marketing, seo, The Pitch
Posted in Ramblings, Small Business | 12 Comments »
September 2nd, 2009 by Duane Jackson
There was a thread on UKBF recently asking for recommendations on PR companies. Someone suggested the money would be better spent on SEO – a debate ensued over what was best, PR or SEO.
My opinion is that they’re two different things and ideally you should use both (sitting on the fence for a change, basically!)
Andy Barr from 10Yetis then posted his tuppence-worth. 10Yetis is a PR Agency we used for years in the early days of KashFlow and Andy also happens to know enough about SEO to give most people a run for their money (he’ll deny this allegation though as he’s too modest). So when he speaks, I listen. I thought his comments were interesting enough to warrant reproducing here:
Timing could not be better for this thread as we have our second instance of having to pitch for a new client where one of the companies we are pitching against is a SEO company.
At the min I see there are being two types of PR Agency, traditional ones who don’t dabble with online media in any way, and then the new breed of agency who understands online media and have their own “specialists” in various fields.
We were really lucky in that early on in our existence we worked with several clients who really opened our eyes to the value of understanding SEO and how PR can work brilliantly alongside campaigns.
As we progressed as an agency we kept coming up against the SEO conversation time and time again, and how we can prove that we can deliver similar value and returns… and so http://www.ps3pricecompare.co.uk was born!
We set up this site and optimised it as best we could and then the only marketing we gave it was EXCLUSIVELY PR.
We chose PS3’s because it is a saturated market, meaning it would be tough to rank highly for key terms, and also more importantly because the commission levels for a PS3 sale is quite good. :-)
Oh yeah, revenue is based on traditional affiliate model, i.e sale = commission payment.
So, we launched the site with a Press Release about something scandalous (think it was about blokes wanting to play games more than they want to have sexy-time with their better half) and it immediately got coverage, including valuable in bound links.
Within 2 months the site was mid way up page one of google for the term “Cheap PS3″ – a key phrase researched from using Hitwise.
We have continued PR’ing it every 2 months or so and the site is now in the top 6/7 page one of google and more importantly delivering a very health revenue stream that we never really anticipated.
So, nothing other than some on-site SEO from our own knowledge and a good blast of PR to build some valuable authority links.
We now use the site as a good example to show people we know about PR and it has also inspired me to set up a few other sideline sites that are only promoted via PR.
I guess that I am trying to say that I think finding a PR agency that understands and can contribute to your existing SEO activity is what people should be looking for and this does not mean one or the other, SEO’s and PR’s should be working in tandem.
Wise words and something to bear in mind when choosing a PR agency.
Update - The Yetis have written this up in a more polished form on their own blog.
Tags: 10yetis, pr, seo, UKBF
Posted in Small Business | 10 Comments »
April 1st, 2009 by Duane Jackson
Back in the dark old days of the internet, Compuserve hoped to have everyone connect to the net via their service. Rather than all these horrible double-you double-yew double-ewe dot names you’d just have Compuserve keywords.
So you’d connect to the internet using the Compuserve software and then enter a keyword, say “finance”, to get to the relevant content.
I’m noticing more and more recently that advertisers seem to want us to go back to using keywords instead of website addresses.
Nintendo tell us in their recent advert “Search for DSI”. An advert for the new Monsters Vs Aliens film says to “go online and search for MVA”. Even the government are getting in on the act and telling us to search for “act on CO2″
What was wrong with just giving out a web address? Surely with this “search on…” approach you’re risking losing your traffic to a affiliate marketers or a competitor who is going to hijack your traffic with some good SEO?
Have I missed something or are advertisers just being very silly at the moment?
I’m attempting to hijack their marketing, but in a different way. Whenever you see an advert that uses this silly tactic, you’ll remember this blog post and think about KashFlows great accounting software : )
Tags: advertising, compuserve, seo
Posted in Ramblings | 5 Comments »
