Don't make it difficult for your website visitors

Tolerance levels are low. Patience is short. Not accepting that in our prospects can ruin the chances of a sale.

This morning I found a great system to help people with their web marketing. Really impressed with it, I searched around the site to see if there was an affiliate program for me to recommend it onto my contacts and clients.


Then I encountered - 'The Form'


It was lengthy and had a fair splattering of agreements that I had to agree to, which I had expected when money is involved. But, each time I tried to complete the process, it threw up messages saying that something was missing.

OK, that's reasonably normal, but what I hadn't noticed was a message in small type at the top pointing out something else I'd missed in addition to the main error it had highlighted. Not only that, but each time I had to re-accept all the agreements by ticking a bunch of boxes again.

After five attempts to say I was getting exasperated would be an understatement and just about to ditch the whole thing. It's a good job it was a damn good product otherwise I would have been long gone! I do wonder how many potential affiliates they lose?

It strikes me that they hadn't asked someone outside of the business to fill in the form as a test. If they had, it surely would have come to light.

Do you have a form or your site? Have you really looked at the messages that appear if something goes wrong? What about the page that they get taken to once completed? Is it clear what will happen next? Is it clear that the process has been successful?

Website visitors COST MONEY to attract - don't throw that money away.

If you need help or advice on your website marketing contact me via my website here:

http://www.roygough.co.uk/

Don't switch off

A client of mine called me today and we were chatting about how his business was doing. He'd been struggling to get enough work in for his family team over the past year. Times have been tough in the building sector.


He told me that he and his wife had been out for a meal a few weeks ago and the locally owned gastro pub they chose was looking a little tired but the food was fantastic.

Remembering what I'd taught him - never miss a business opportunity - he took a note of the owners details and contacted him later to show him their portfolio.

It hasn't got him the pub job - yet - but it did get him a three month contract to do a major project in one of the family homes.

Turns out that the pub is one of three they own in the area and, if all goes well with the current job, he'll be well positioned to take on the renovation work that's planned for them.

Sometimes being in the right place at the right time can get you work.

But, if you 'switch off' when you are out socially, you might not realise that you're in the right place, at the right time, right now!

Terry Rees and his family owned property maintenance and repair business is based just outside Norwich.
http://www.propertymaintenanceandrepair.co.uk/

Some real website crackers!

I always love to see websites that make you scream in horror!

In these days of templates and easy to use web generators you can't really believe that stuff like this is still around.

Anyway enjoy these www's - (woeful web wonders)

http://msy.com.au/

http://www.frnz.de/

http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/

http://home.comcast.net/~computerphysicians/

http://www.arngren.net/

http://www.cwol.com/

Ohh, The bucket's over there in the corner by the way.

If you want to make sure your customers feel comfortable and happy when they visit your website contact me at Alloy CRM and I'll help you sort it out.

How did you choose your business name?

Choosing a business name always seems an exciting time and loads of ideas run around your head before you finally settle on 'The One'. But there's a few things that you should consider before those ideas run wild.

1. If the business is not going to be a global player, and potentially a household name, then including something that indicates something about what you do can help potential customers decide if they should be calling you or not.

Clever is ok, but if it leaves them mystified, it hasn't really helped the cause. Would Aviva, Corus or Square Giraffe say anything about your business?

If your business is really local I would even consider making it blatantly obvious what you do - Suffolk Management Training or Norfolk Plumbing Repairs.

2. Next on the list is to find out if your chosen name already exists. A search on Companies House and Trade Mark listings will show up whether your new business 'McDonalds Take Away' might get you into deep water with their legal department or simply get you confused with others of a similar name.

3. Finally you need to consider the Internet.

You really do need to have a domain name that matches your business name. Without that people will struggle to find you. If you have got this far and the domain name isn't available then I would go back to step one and start again.

If you are a UK based business then you absolutely need to have the .co.uk version of your business name but I would also buy the .com .net .tv .info and .biz versions too. Just think of the consequences of a competitor setting up in the same business, taking one of those domain suffixes, marketing it like mad and taking half your business. Just allow enough in your budget to buy all of them to be sure.

If we take one of the business name examples above I would also buy the hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions - suffolkmanagementtraining as well as suffolk-management-training. The second version is easier for people to see, understand and remember when it's on your physical advertising.

Hyphens can help too if the words could be mis-read when put together. There are some famous 'howlers' in this department which must have horrified their owners once they realised:-

therapistfinder - 'therapist finder' or could be 'the rapist finder'
expertsexchange - 'experts exchange' or 'expert sex change'
whorepresents - 'who represents' or 'whore presents'
penisland - which is actually 'pen island' apparently

Advertising the hyphenated version of each of those domain names would have saved a great deal of embarrassment!

If you are choosing your business name, then choose it wisely.

Needs some help getting your business up and running? Just call me. Sales & Marketing Strategy with AlloyCRM

Is selling tough for you?

Is selling tough for you at the moment? I guess for most of us it is, especially in the current economic climate.

Being a good (great) salesperson helps and will at least keep some sales flowing in, even during hard times. But just being great isn't enough anymore really. Life, the world and your prospects have moved on and the word 'gullible' has definitely been removed from their dictionary!

I have always believed that, to be a great sales person, you have to know the basics first. It's just like any new skill you learn there are some primary text books to cover and understand before you move on to more advanced stuff.

Richard Denny's Selling to Win is one of those text books. Every new sales person should at least read and understand it's contents, but it's also good to read as an occasional refresher for us all. But sales life has moved on dramatically and we need to view the process in a new light.

I came across Sean McPheat, a sales training guru, recently and downloaded his excellent eBook The Sales Persons Crisis . It just requires your email address to access and there is no charge. It's a really worthwhile read and should help you understand and cope with the changes in sales techniques required to compete today.

More sales resources are available on my Alloy CRM website here: http://www.alloycrm.com/buslinktraining

Don't hide your success - shout about it!

We had a stroll around the beautiful grounds of Blickling Hall in Norfolk today. A really picturesque setting with a National Trust managed stately hall as it's setting - well worth a visit.

Next to the car park is a shop called Samphire that sells excellent local food including their renowned local sausages.

You can't miss that their sausages are good (and I can tell you that they are good!) because everywhere you look it says that Gary Rhodes says they are the best he's ever tasted! In fact it's quite difficult to walk out of the shop without buying some the message is so strong.

We British are pretty poor at being proud of what we do well. Make sure that, if someone tells you how good you are, you let everyone know - on your website, in your advertising, on your van, in a press release to the media.

Don't hide your success - shout about it!

What's special about your home page?

On a recent web marketing course I was running, one of the delegates said ".. so my home page is a bit like the reception area of my bricks & mortar business?"

Well yes, he's probably right.

Those visitors who arrive on your website after seeing your domain name in your adverts, on your business card or on your van, will most certainly land on your home page. You then have just a few seconds to create the right impression - exactly as you would when someone walked into your main reception.

Things get complicated from then on.... Not everyone will land on your home page.

Some will go straight to one of your sub pages that have been suggested by Google, or one of the other search engines, as relevant to their search phrase. They don't know (or care for that matter) that the page they've been sent to isn't your pristine, smart reception home page.

But they will certainly treat it as such! That means you have some hard work to do!

Every page on your site needs to stand up as a viable and professional reception page otherwise you'll fall at the first hurdle and they will look elsewhere.

Get looking at your web pages in isolation and see how they stack up.

Cheap as Chips or Reassuringly Expensive?

Deciding your price can be difficult, especially when you are just starting out or creating new products or services.

It's very tempting to finding out your competitors pricing and just undercut it.

But is that the best policy? Consider these points before you do that.

Tesco

10-15 years ago their slogan was a very clear 'Stack 'm High and Sell 'm Cheap'. It's taken all those years to modify our perception of them to be targeting the better quality supermarket retailers. It couldn't have been done over night.

They changed their out-of-town outlets to look upmarket and introduced quality brands. They made them better places to be and added 'service' to their offer to change our perceptions.

If we position ourselves as 'cheap' have we got the time, or resources, to take ourselves up in value so that we are working on better margins and become more profitable?

Price Perception

Something that has no charge is often perceived as having no value. The Business Link Workshops I have been delivering have a poor attendance from those who have booked. Is that because they are free, they have no perceived value?

Similarly, if we charge bottom prices does that brand our offer in the same way?

USP

Creating your offer as different from the competition - finding a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) - means you can charge a more realistic price as you are offering something different to your competition, taking price comparison, as a means of customer choice, to a lower priority.

Being different can make a massive difference.

Avoid Selling on Price

Find ways of selling on the benefits of your product or service. Tap into the desires, wants an needs of your potential customers and sell them Solutions rather than features. Everything in you marketing and advertising should represent how they will Feel after they have purchased rather than what it is they are buying.

Conclusion

Some businesses will find this more difficult than others as there are sectors that are really price sensitive such as home electronics. However, if it were all about price only, who would ever buy a B&O sound system instead of a Sanyo or a BMW 5 series rather than a Ford Mondeo?

Need help with your sales and marketing strategy? Call me and just ask.

Don't Compete on Price

If you are going to sell the same product or service as everyone else, sold in the same way and in the the same street too, then there is only one thing that differentiates you from your competitors - Price!

I don't know about you but I don't just want to be competing on price. That's reduced margins and a constant price war between you and your competitors to be the cheapest.

So how do you get away from price?

1. Don't sell the same product or service in the same way as everyone else.

Don't sell the 'same'! Find a way to re-package or add value to make your offer different. Seek out you customers and work out what they are really looking for when they buy from you. Tap into their desires and needs. Sell not just a product or service but an outcome.

Look for things that go with your product and bundle them in with a different price tag. Make yourself an advice and expert centre.

Do anything that steps you above your competitors and makes the price just one part of the buying decision rather than the only buying decision.

2. Don't sell in the same place.

Look for somewhere 'different' to sell. Size up your competitors and where their main selling and advertising focus sits.

Working out your customers real requirements will help you understand the problems they have and solutions they need which drive them to look for your products and services. Look for times and places that these may appear.

Work out what they may be asking or looking for - it may be different to how you would traditionally have thought. Then find ways of 'being there' at the right time.

This is all about finding your own Unique Selling Proposition or USP.

Without it you'll be selling on price and ever-reducing margins.

Need help getting your business moving? I'll see if I can help with your Sales and Marketing Strategy or your Website Profit

Get Ready for a Great 2010

Christmas is just about over and the New Year is just around the corner.

Going by the activity in the last quarter, 2010 looks set to be much better for buisness. Most seem to be waking up to the fact that sitting on your hands and doing nothing, hoping to sit it out and that the storm will just pass by isn't an option.

Doing the Second World War, Cadbury's chocolate continued to advertise heavily despite a severe shortage of their products and no chance of increasing revenue. But, once hostilities ceased and production restarted fully, the Cadbury's name was the one on peoples mind. It built their business to be the strong brand it is today.

Don't sit on the fence and wait for the world to pass you by. Get out there and let everyone know who you are and what you do - the business world hasn't stopped.

If you need help working out the best way to get your products and services in front of the right people - on the internet or in the real world - call me at Alloy CRM for a chat and see if I can help.

What do your customers really buy?

Do you really understand why your customers might buy your product or service?

Is it because of the 'features' you offer?

Let's say you wanted to buy a new laptop computer.

You might go out and look for one with 3gb of ram, a 2.5 hour battery life and a 250gb hard drive.

But in reality you're not looking for those features because they excite you. You look for them because:

> 3gb Ram means your laptop will run quickly, smoothly and allow you to have several programs running at once without too much adverse effect.

> A 2.5 hour battery life means you can sit on the train on the way to a meeting and work for pretty much all of the journey being more productive and not wasting time.

> A 250gb hard drive means you can store all of your holiday picture and videos without running out of space.

These are the 'Benefits'

Before you went into the PC shop you did the analysis of what you wanted out of your laptop (the benefits) and the features required to achieve them.

Understanding the difference between features and benefits is critical to successful marketing and sales.

Sometimes (often, maybe) the benefits are not so clear cut as the laptop example. Take the motor industry for example.

A car, whatever type or size it is, will get you from A to B in the dry and warm. Even the performance of the car is pretty irrelevant as the speed limit is 70 mph, and it's often impossible to use the acceleration or cornering capabilities of high performance cars in this country.

So why does one person buy a small car and another buy a large luxury sports model?

It comes down to life style, status or aspirations. If that's the case then your advertising needs to reflect that.

Have you ever seen an advert for a Bentley or an Aston Martin with it parked in an Asda car park? No, but you might see an ad' for a small family car with happy parents putting their smiling children into the back seat and ample shopping in the boot outside a smart supermarket.

The Bentley is more likely to be sitting outside the Savoy Hotel or some other very swanky part of London's West End.

Right. If we understand the difference between the Features that people buy as against the Benefits that people are really looking for then we need to work that out for our business and products or services.

I came across a very useful device to help with this process in a book called The Jelly Effect by Andy Bounds.

He suggests going through a routine he describes as 'So What?'

Start by writing down a feature and then asking yourself 'So What'. Answer that and continue asking 'So What' until you really can't answer any more.

Now you are potentially at the root benefit that your customers are looking for and in a position to find ways of communicating that in your advertising and marketing.

If you want more help to find your core benefits read The Jelly Effect or call me for some personal advice.

Alloy CRM - Sales and Marketing Strategy

Is the 'Home' page of your website of any value?

Is the 'Home' page of your website of any value?

The way in which all the main search engines, such as Google, work is that they find your home page, follow it's navigation links and discover all the other pages that make up the site.

If you've been doing your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) correctly, each of those pages will be targeting a tightly focused small number of keywords or phrases. The purpose is to help Google understand EXACTLY what that page is about so that it can effectively determine when to show that page in the organic , or natural, listing as a good potential page for the searcher to view.

This shows that Google indexes pages rather than sites as a whole. Your Home page probably isn't sufficiently keyword focused to be shown in most listings as a response to a search query. This leads to some SEO experts to say that the Home page is of little value.

I beg to differ.

1. Unless you are a totally internet based business relying upon the search engine rankings to gain site visitors you will be using your domain name - www.mycompanyname.co.uk, which is effectively your Home page - on your business card, flyers, brochures, newspaper adverts, on your van and anywhere else you can legally find to display it.

2. If someone hears about your business they might just type in your company name. That could well produce your home page at the top of the search engine listings because it probably isn't product or service targeted.


So your Home page is absolutely vital. It's your office reception. Most bricks and mortar businesses spend a great deal on making their reception area feel warm, inviting and confidence building so that you might feel happier doing business with them.


Make sure your Home page creates a great impression and easily directs visitors to the part of the site they are looking for.

But in reality, every page on your site is a 'reception'. If that's the first page they go to on your site then it's really got to do the same job as the Home page, but do it's sales job as well. That's going to be tough to get right.

Is it any wonder that making profit from your website can be so tough?

If you need help with your site to make it profitable my Wesite Profit Program might be your answer.

Testimonials make it all worth while.

I received a great testimonial from a grateful client today:

" I saw a prospect in November it came to nothing.

He was nosing at my website as it's the new tax year etc. He saw the video and was very impressed and has just signed up. A significant annual fee!

Many thanks :-) :-) "

That was from Simon Clarke, a partner at Great Yarmouth Accountants, HW Chartered Accountants.

What did I do to make it happen? I produced this short business video for HW Accountants just a few weeks ago and Simon uploaded it to his web page just last week.

I always look for ways to maximise the use of the Internet to increase leads, sales and profits. It has been my strong opinion for some time that the use of video on websites help build trust and confidence. This just proves it!

If you do the Return on Investment sums I should think that it comes out pretty well!

Need a video like that on your site? Call me at Alloy CRM and have a look at some other interesting video on my Alloy CRM video channel at You Tube.

Customer Dis-Service

My car went in for its MOT today so Gill and I had an hour to kill down near the harbours mouth and Gorleston sea front.

The weather was beautiful and we strolled up to the hotel overlooking the beach and sat down at an outside table to relax for a while with a cappuccino.

It was still a little chilly in the wind and I kept my coat on. With my hand on the end of the metal chair arm I became aware that the green hammerite paint felt a little 'soft' in places. Looking closer at the table and the other chairs it was obvious that they had been painted recently in time for the start of the summer season.

Concerned by the soft paint I looked at the underside of my sleeve to discover a small splodge of matching green paint on the material. Thankfully my coat is old anyway, but it's still one I wear often by choice.

Concerned that someone after me may ruin a good, and maybe expensive, piece of clothing I sought out the staff inside the hotel to alert them to the problem.

I was taken aback by the complete lack of interest and was simply told that the outside furniture had been painted yesterday and none of the managers were in. No apology. No concern. I was thrown really and walked out.

With a clear head I went back a short while later and voiced my feelings. The answer was 'No managers are here, what can we do?'

I pointed out that finding the offending chair, plus any others still not fully set, would avoid anyone else doing the same and potentially placing a hefty claim on the hotel.

Still no action so I left my card and said I would be writing to the owners. At last some response! An apology! But still no action.

What ever happened to care and responsibility? Not for the first time this month I have pondered that question.

Customer Relationship Management and Customer Service done well enhance a business. Done badly they can ruin it.

Will I tell everyone this story, probably. Will it increase sales and their business, very unlikely.

Alloy CRM for Customer Relationship Solutions and online marketing

Master Email Lists to Increase Profits

I spend most of my time now working with on-line sales and marketing, but for the last 10 years I've been specialising in CRM - Customer Relationship Management.

They may seem worlds apart but there is a great deal that brings them together.

The whole purpose of having a website for your business is to generate enquiries, leads or direct sales. Either
way you will be collecting some data about your prospective customers. Probably all their details when they have purchased but maybe just their email address when they first enquire.

What you do with that data can make a great deal of difference to the result - a sale and maybe a second sale later on.

The smart businesses do that by using CRM. It isn't a piece of software, it's a process.

Keeping in touch with the people on your list can really make the difference. If they have made an initial enquiry, then sending them an answer quickly followed by a number of sequenced emails with more information and appropriate offers is likely to result in a sale down the line because you bothered to keep in touch.

Doing that can be a pain and time consuming, even though the end result is worthwhile.

There are a number of autoresponders around that make that process easy for you. Once your enquirer has handed over their email address via your web page, a whole series of email followups can kick-in, all designed to entice your prospect to take the next step.

Once you have written the emails and decided the gap between each before they are sent out, the whole thing is automated for you. Those email addresses are now held securely and have agreed that you can send them appropriate information. So, if you have a new product or service to shout about, it's easy to send out a mail to everyone who has ever enquired.

You don't even have to worry about people who un-subscribe or whose email address bounces. That's all done for you at a really sensible and cost effective price.

There are two providers I use regularily, aWeber - probably accepted as the industry standard, and SendFree - not quite free if you want the emails to look right, but still inexpensive.

If you would like to go down this route and need some help and guidance, please contact me through my site Alloy CRM site where I help businesses increase sales, revenue and profit.
http://alloycrm.aweber.com
http://www.sendfree.com/affref/105448/

Green Shoots of Recovery?

I heard today that a major estate agent in Norwich believes they are seeing movement in the housing market.

They have been selling housing stock at the lower end of the price range, which must be good news. The downside is the price reduction those owners have had to make in order to sell. Apparently they had to drop from around £140k at the top of the boom to £100k now.

Realistically though the boom peak prices were just off this planet and needed a major correction anyway so the losses aren't as large as they appear.

In another whisper I heard today, the banks seem to have found their business loan application forms again and are actively handing out money. I guess (hope) they are being a bit more careful in their credit checking rather than the lax "does he breathe and can he sign his name' check they seem to be using on some lending up to last year.

If your with me and see the twinkle of light at the end of the tunnel, then make sure you hit the ground running when it all takes off by having your on and off line sales strategy already fired up. Need help with it? Contact me at Alloy CRM for help with increasing your revenue and profits.

Someone made me think about networking

As the Chapter Director of a BNI (Business Network International) group in Norwich, I was passed the contact details of someone who had shown interest in visiting and maybe joining our group. I sent out the appropriate invitation and received a reply that said they had spoken to most of our members at other networking events and they were not able to sell to them then, so there would be no point in joining. I sent them a polite (hopefully) reply explaining what networking is really about.

Yes there will always be an element of the hunter in us all at networking events, some events are more suited to it than others. Andy Bounds excellent book The Jelly Effect explains how to maximise this process well. He goes through the process of identifying your 'Big Fish' in the room and succeeding in securing a meeting later to discuss business opportunities.

However groups like BNI work on a different dimension. They are based on relationships. Understanding what your fellow members do, how they add value and their ideal target customer gives us the background knowledge we need to find them suitable prospective customers in our daily travels and maybe within our own client base.

To do this effectively we spend a great deal of time understanding each others business and gaining confidence and trust in their ability to fulfil. That's not a quick win. It takes time to build that sort of relationship, but once it's there is very sound and can be very lucrative.

So if you're just about to look at networking as a new form of marketing then make sure you understand how networking works before you blunder out there and think it's a waste of time.

Roy Gough of Alloy CRM helps businesses increase sales both on and off line.

Bangers 'n Mash and the Internet

Pay Per Click advertising, through Internet search engines, still remains a bit of a mystery to many business owners. Not just the mechanics of making them work, but the core of why they can be so cost effective.

I always try to make things simple with real world analogies. So here goes.

Imagine you are a butcher specialising in rather exclusive sausages.

I'm delving into a personal fantasy here. My favorite meal, you may be horrified to know, is bangers and mash and my favorite 'restaurant' is a cafe tucked under the M40 flyover on Portobello Road in West London. They always have a choice of 6 or 7 unusual and delicious sausages, several mash combinations and few different varieties of gravy to finish it off. Absolutely superb!

So, back to the story, you're a butcher specialising in unusual sausages and you want to open a shop. But rather than opening your shop in the general high street you choose an unusual cul-de-sac. Here EVERY shop is a Butcher specialising in sausages.

Is that commercial suicide? Not necessarily.

The good news is that every person who wanders into that street is a potential customer, they just wouldn't be there otherwise. The bad news is that they may only buy from one shop.

But there's further good news. You will only pay your costs of being there on footfall through your door. In other words you will only pay when you actually attract someone into your shop and potentially sell some sausages.

So your job as a butcher is to make your shop window the most appealling and attractive in the street.

You can count the number of people who walk past your window and those who walk through the door. You can also measure the number that actually buy and how much they spend against that charge you pay for everyone that walks in.

Armed with those ratios and cost per sale, you can change your shop window as many times as you like to test the effect on your ratios and ultimately your profit.

But you're not restricted to how many times you change the window, so you can refine it constantly to maximise the results. Unlike many other forms of advertising, you are only paying for a defined result - someone walking through your door.

There's one more important aspect too. There will undoubtedly be some spots on the street that 'perform' better than others. If your shop window is effective in getting larger percentages of passers by into the shop, you'll be promoted to a better spot.

But you can short cut that promotion too by changing the amount you are prepared to pay each time someone walks in your door to try and secure the shop position you want. The more you are prepared to pay the better your position.

If you're still with me, I'll relate that to Pay Per Click advertising and make our butcher an internet business.

Your cul-de-sac is the phrase that potential sausage buyers might type into a search engine such as Google. They might type 'Wild Boar Sausages'. Your shop can sit in any number cul-de-sacs of key phrases that may be typed in by sausage buyers.

Your shop window is the 4 line advert that appears on the right hand side of the search results page. How good your ad' is determines the number of people who walk through your door into your website - the point at which you pay.


The final part, the one that decides if the project is worth while, is how effective the inside of the shop is in getting customers to buy. Are your potential customers seeing what they expected after being attracted in by your window display, or do they see Beef and Lamb joints with the sausages tucked right at the back of the shop out of site? That's the landing page on your website that you send visitors to.


Pay Per Click (PPC) can, if managed correctly, be a very effective and productive way to increase sales and profits. It should be considered alongside more traditional forms of advertising. Once you've tasted it's success you may find that your advertising spend will be reviewed in the light of it's results.


If you need help to make your website produce profit through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising contact me at Alloy CRM.

A simple guide to website ranking with links

One of the key factors influencing how your site is indexed, and ranked, in the search engines is that of inbound links.

These are hyperlinks to pages on your site from other sites on the web. The basic theory is that the more links you have, the higher the value of your own site. Why? Because the search engines will assume that, if all those other people think your site is interesting enough to link to, then it must be important.

That was the premise a few years back, but sadly that assumption was abused by the darker side of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). They set up thousands of sites that were just 'Link Farms'. Pages and pages of listings with links to other sites. The more links you had on these sites, the better value you appeared to have, thus skewing the listing results.

Google got smart to this idea and, in an attempt to reduce the effect, they introduced a system of ranking each page it indexed. It's ranking process included a host of factors but was mainly designed to weed out the Link Farms. In fact sites that were/are still found to be listed on these sites are often penalised heavily and their own indexing can be severely impaired making it difficult to appear in any of the results listings.

So let's go back to the beginning. Inbound links are important, but they have to be carefully chosen and prepared links.

Here are the three key factors you should consider:

1: What is the Page Rank (PR) of the page and site that will show the link? The higher the PR the better as it seen as an important site and it's outbound links are valued higher too. Not only that but it will 'feed' some of it's high ranking across to your page as a bonus.

2: Is the site relevant to yours? As an example let's say your site was about pet products. If you had a link on a site with heaps of information all about dogs - that would make sense to Google and be valued. A link on a dating site would be seen as totally irrelevant and virtually ignored.

3. Use good 'Anchor Text'. Having a hyperlink to your pet product site showing as www.petproducts.co.uk on that dog information site is not so effective, and meaningful, as having the hyperlinked text saying 'Buy dog baskets, leads and dog food'. Google sees and understands the relationship between the wording on the information site, the anchor text and that of your site - so it will value the link higher.

So to summarise, links to your site are good, but not all links. Be careful about accepting offers of links, especially if they are asking you to pay. Take time to consider those key factors before you commit.

Finally there is the issue of reciprocal links - the 'You show me yours and I'll show you mine' of the internet world.

You may be offered a link to your site in return for a link to theirs. If you accept this and the link to them is shown on, for example, page 2 of your site and the link to you on their site also points to your page 2, it will easily seen as reciprocal and not a 'vote' of confidence in your or your website, therefore valued less.

Turn that around based on the 3 key factors earlier in this blog. If the link from them is on a page of information about dogs, the anchor text reflects that and the page on your site which it points to is about dogs that's good.

So in return, work something on the same principal but using different pages, perhaps about cats. That way the links are less likely to be seen as reciprocal.

I hope that all makes sense, but you can always talk to me about how to maximise your website profits at Alloy CRM, Sales & Marketing Strategists

The Effects of Facebook?

There have been a couple of articles in the Daily Mail recently about the effects of the internet, specifically social networking sites, on us and children in particular.


The first was suggesting that social networking sites could produce cancer. At first glance you would probably say rubbish. However we need to dig a little deeper beyond the media headline hype.

Our bodies have evolved to be a socially interactive animal. Devoid of that element in our life can cause mental, and physical, problems. This is well documented by prisoners and hostages over the years. On the surface, social interaction via sites such as Facebook fulfills that requirement in our life. But does our body understand that?

Is our body hard-wired to determine the required social interaction as being face to face where it can receive not only words but also facial expressions and body gestures? The internet removes all of that. How many times have you misinterpreted an email, got the wrong end of the stick and reacted inappropriately?

So if you take the case of someone who's life revolves around the internet and they just don't meet anyone, how is the body going to react?


Dr David Mickel, the GP who discovered the possible cause of ME, believes that the body generates symptoms, and sometimes real illnesses, in an attempt to force a change in circumstances to rectify the life balance.

So if that's the case, maybe the theory of Facebook causing cancer may not be so far fetched.


Thankfully, for the vast majority of us, social networking sites are just a relatively small part of our life and we live, most of the time, in the real world.

The second article was a front page headline suggesting that the same social networking sites are causing our children to have remarkably short attention spans. Well if you've got this far down my blog you certainly don't suffer from that!


In this case I think we need to look at the wider world that our children are brought up in. It's a world of short, sharp messages and multi-tasking.

Most informative programes on television are broken into micro-segments with several themes running in tandem throughout the show. Flipping backwards and forwards between them with quick updates to remind you what's happening. I find that type of programming quite frustrating as I'm used to the traditional format but it must be popular as they all use it now.


Written media has taken the same direction too. The popular press and magazines consist of snippets supported by photographic images, almost a comic style, with no real substantial essay type material.

And then, of course, there is texting. Rapid, word truncated, conversations that are conducted whilst doing something else.

So is Facebook causing the problem? I doubt it. I think it's more about the new world we live in - good or bad is up to you to decide.

If you want help to make use of the internet to produce profit for your business contact me at Alloy CRM