blog

should you build a corporate blog

Posted by simon ashwin On Wednesday 30 Jan 08

A corporate blog can be an effective marketing device. While all blogs provide a venue for quick publishing and water cooler-type dialogue, there are two major kinds. Each provides very different benefits to your organization.

An external blog, which is accessible to the Internet, is a powerful public relations tool. Infused with corporate flavour yet more informal than a press release, the information published in this setting builds brand authority.

Many external blogs have taken the place of published newsletters companies historically would provide their regular and prospective customers. The blogs often provide information on company offerings and initiatives, give valuable advice, and reinforce the company’s identity.

An internal blog is available only on a company intranet to employees and, optionally, selected associates. Often this is a platform for thought leaders to share their vision. It can also be a forum for corporate evangelists or experts to talk about the business of your business.

There are also CEO blogs, which are available both internally and externally. These caught the wave of popularity coming out of the technology sector and are often vectored to that same audience. In areas outside the geek-set, PR groups struggle to quantify the benefit of a CEO Blog unless that person’s personality and knowledge in their field are largely identified with the company’s value.

The pitfalls of blogs are inherent to any kind of publishing. Despite the immediacy of it, the content should be vetted as carefully as it would be...

why you should optimize your site for rss

Posted by simon ashwin On Tuesday 22 Jan 08

Like a newspaper or magazine gathers articles for readers, Internet denizens have taken to using programs that collect dynamic content of their favourite sites. This allows them to do create a single page that scans a list of websites to either previews fresh content or even provide entire articles.

It’s possible because of RSS feeds. RSS is an acronym with several definitions: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or a variation on one of those. The bottom line is that RSS is a text format pulled from a site’s XML.

In activating your website with a RSS feed, you’ve made the content in that feed available to syndication. Just like columns can appear in several newspapers, this makes the articles and blogs you publish available be viewed by any number of aggregators.

This is an easy and customer-friendly way to let customers know that there is fresh content on your site. While email-notification also does this, more and more readers have become overwhelmed by their email inboxes and look to their RSS aggregators for this information.

However, activating an RSS feed is not as simple as it seems. Many automated RSS feeds simply default to publishing the first sentences of new content, which may not give a good insight to the blog. And publishing entire articles leaves a website open for a tactic called ‘scraping’. This happens when competitors plagiarize articles to other blogs. It’s detrimental in many ways, perhaps the worst being...

google analytics

Posted by simon ashwin On Saturday 19 Jan 08

Ever wondered how your company’s website fares against others in your industry? Google Analytics, a free service offered by Google, can provide detailed statistics about your website – including industry benchmarking that tells you exactly how your website compares.

Google Analytics is a tool that was launched in 2005. The detailed, and free, reporting package was an immediate and phenomenal hit. Faced with an overwhelming demand, Google had to slow down registrations to invitation-only until mid-2006 until it expanded its infrastructure to handle the load.

There are over 80 reports in the Google Analytics package. Included is data on how people found a site and how they explore it. This includes tracking visitors through the exploration of the site, how long they stay, and an analysis of where they came from.

From a commercial perspective, some of the most critical data is how the site compares to others in the same field. This goes beyond surface data like hit counts to reports on conversions (sales), ad performance, and lead generation (email registrations).

This is powerful information for marketing and sales teams, especially when applied to Google AdWords campaigns. Google Analytics is fully integrated with AdWords and illustrates which keywords are really working and which ones are not working for the site.

In understanding how your website is performing compared to others, opting-in to Google Analytics benchmarking feature will enable reports on your site's performance against comparables, and metrics on how your niche compares...

getting the most from google adwords

Posted by simon ashwin On Thursday 10 Jan 08

The buy-in for Google Adwords can be very low and yield massive results. This is the allure that has made their Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign so overwhelmingly popular.

But what seems simple at the start gets complex very quickly. The prices for the more popular keywords can be very high, and grow higher by the day. It is critical to ensure that the keywords your company chooses are both accurate and yet not too generic. Because the hidden algorithms Google employs are updated constantly, choosing the keywords is not a point-in-time solution but a process that evolves over time.

Similarly, the content of the ad that Google displays for your company should be carefully crafted. The right phrase can mean the difference of thousands of visitors to your site. Design elements like capital letters or ASCII art can also have a huge impact.
Packaging the right keywords with an attractive ad will reap huge traffic rewards, but may not equal success over time. Google is very concerned that the visitors that click on the AdWords get what they are looking for. They are also concerned that they get full value for the traffic they send your way, so they grade your landing page with something called a Quality Score. If your site has a low score, they may take away your keywords, a practice known as a Google Slap.

Keeping your website clear of the elements that could lower your score means staying current on Google’s...

combining video content with seo

Posted by simon ashwin On Thursday 03 Jan 08

Today amongst a Web2.0 field, search engines are beginning to concentrate on not only gathering text and images but video content. Naturally the demand by users has risen dramatically. As a business, you want to include content that is not only going to entice users to explore your other web site content, but showcase your product or service in a unique way to anticipate use.

As a great selling point, organizations can use a creative, cleverly marketed video package to demonstrate and display your product or service.

According to recent statistics, of the 80 per cent of Australian’s online, 62 percent are regular video viewers. Today, video’s online rival advertisements on television because of the potential to reach millions of viewers worldwide at no cost. For progressive companies, a popular video can become a positive and permanent addition to your brand awareness.

Keys to optimizing your video content and expanding your business brand

To make your web site a worthwhile investment, your content needs to be visible to search engines and clients. Video content that is not optimized can often be ignored, as consumers use search engines to locate videos and generally do not go directly to the source. Therefore the optimization of your video content is crucial. Whiteduck can implement a well designed, marketing strategy and employ tools such as Social Bookmarking and RSS Feeds to entice users to your web site and increase the average time spent browsing your web site.

Optimization of...

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