If you have recently had a blog installed on your business website, you may find this helpful. The purpose of this article is to help you ensure that your Blog:

• Enhances the image and credibility of your business
• Drives additional traffic to your website
• Delivers a return on your investment

What are the benefits of having a Blog?

• It allows your business comment in an authoritative way about issues affecting your clients and your industry.
• It enhances the credibility of the business and of individual staff members within the business.
• It can be very helpful in driving additional traffic to your website.
• The articles written can also be used to set up a monthly newsletter.

Why your Blog needs to be actively managed

The simple reason is that, in our experience, it its not managed it won’t be regularly updated.  Not only do you stop getting the benefits from your Blog, you in fact can begin to damage your reputation as potential customers see that you have lost interest in keeping it up-to-date.  They might assume that your interest in them as customers may be similarly short lived.

To illustrate this, if at any point the Blog becomes too time consuming to keep up-to-date we normally recommend removing it from your site.

Benefiting from your Blog – Simple Tips

1. It is likely that you will be asking several staff members to make regular contributions to the Blog.  If you don’t clearly explain the short and long term benefits for them and the business they will see this as an additional burden they can do without.

   ACTION: Allow 15 minutes at your next team meeting to explain why a Blog is important and why it is on your website.




2. As the business owner, you need to make the Blog as ‘self-managing’ as possible.  Otherwise it will prove to be a burden for you.  The Blog should feature as an agenda item at regular management/team meetings. You also need to delegate the writing of articles to appropriate members of staff.

   ACTION: Include ‘Blog Articles’ as an agenda item at all management meetings ACTION: Decide who will write articles and brief them accordingly ACTION: Agree number of articles required per month and then define a schedule that everyone can sign up to.  (Ideally the Blog should have 1 new article per week but certainly no less than 2 per month).

3. Try to build up a small bank of articles so that you are never short of an article.  This really reduces the stress on everyone.

   ACTION: Ask for 2 articles per person to get things started.  Then hold the extra one back and release as required.  Obviously bearing in mind that some articles need to be more current than others.

4. Like all parts of business, you will need to apply a quality control measure.  You should ask to review all articles before they go live on the site.

   ACTION: Ask contributors to email their article to you before it goes live and to also give you a certain number of days to review it.




5. Why not use the articles you have written to make a monthly email newsletter?  And if you do, invest in a newsletter design and system that fits your overall online look and feel.

   ACTION: Assess whether an email newsletter would be suitable for your business.

We’ve just launched our first ever Classified Ads website for Fetch.ie

The client wanted something that would offer great functionality but also look visually attractive. The site user should find it very easy to drill down within categories to find specific ads. This is something that is hard to find elsewhere.

It costs €3 to place an ad on Fetch.

Let us know what you think of the site. For the first 10 people who send in a comment, we have a free promotional code that allows you to place ads for free for a period of time.

We thought this site was worth a mention on our blog as we think this signage company has the biggest online product catalogue for the sector they operate in. And, they are hoping to double the number of images on the site in the coming weeks!

There are all types of signs available such as, information signs, safety signs, warning signs and many more. ETAG Signs also do a range of branded clothing.

They have a great reputation for their speedy turnaround of orders as well as the value for money they offer. We have bought a few bits and pieces ourselves and the quality is always excellent.

They are based in Ashbourne, Co Meath and they deliver throughout Ireland.

Check out ETAG Signs at http://www.etagsigns.ie/

Have you heard the one about the online business that tried and tried and tried, for months and months and months, to get a mention in a national newspaper? And then when they finally did, it added hardly any extra visitors to their website? We have a few clients that experienced this recently and we thought it was quite interesting.

Have you or any of your clients experienced this unusual phenomenon? Please let us know. We might do a more in depth analysis at some future point.

In the meantime, in the absence of any reliable scientific (or otherwise) data, we will rely on our own intuition to spew out some easily challengeable observations and conclusions. Blog posts are great aren’t they? Imagine being able to write such opinion-based stuff when you were in college. Thank god these days are behind us :-)

Observations

(Remember, we are focusing here on businesses that generate most or all of their income from online product/service sales. But it also can apply to offline businesses who might think that a PR mention in a newspaper will drive extra traffic to their website.)

Anyway, back to the matter in hand and straight on to our ‘observations’.

• A ‘mention’ isn’t enough. If you happen to get a passing mention in an article and even if your website URL is stated, you will NOT need a new server to cope with the extra traffic.
• The ‘disconnect’ between the newspaper that is being read and the reader’s computer that could be switched off and/or be in a different place is a critical flaw. This is perhaps the most important observation. Your typical ‘data collector’ who reads newspapers, surfs the net, etc. has an attention span that barely surpasses that of a goldfish. The chances of that person retaining the information about your website, the reason why they want to visit it AND the URL would appear to be very low.
• If you haven’t got something unique you are in even more trouble. If the product or service you are promoting is a ‘me-too’ type offering, the value of your offline PR is likely to be pretty low.
• A memorable URL can help your efforts but it would appear to only reduce the effects of the above.
• Newspapers are mostly ‘scan-read’ and there is single layer of information. You begin reading and then you finish. End of experience. Compare that to online information gathering which is multi-layered, journey-like and almost open-ended. If you are an online business, aiming your public relations as directly as possible into that context has to be more beneficial than trying to move people from another context first (and hoping they remember you as they move across)

But… it’s not all bad news. Here are a few other thoughts:

• The rise in smart phone usage could gradually reduce the effect of the ‘disconnect’ issue above as more readers will have a browser easily at hand. But, remember your offer will need to better than just OK in order to get people to browse on a small screen.
• With more and more newspapers mentioning websites, more people are getting tuned in to keeping a ‘future browsing list’ but I for one wouldn’t be pinning my hopes on these ultra-organised types.
• We’re seeing more visual imagery in newspapers and this means that URLs are often appended to product photos and this can also help recall rates. The most successful examples of where offline PR does work for online e-commerce businesses is where brand new, otherwise unique, or heavily discounted products are promoted using photographs. The product pages on in the Irish Indo and Irish Times magazines on a Saturday are good examples.
• Even if you don’t get a website visit from the PR, you will still benefit from the increased awareness of your brand that the PR delivers. The value of this will vary depnding on the extent of the coverage and which business sector you operate in.

Conclusions

• If you have an e-commerce business, do not build your marketing strategy on an aggressive PR strategy aimed at national newspapers unless you have a truly compelling offering.
• Focus your efforts on online PR, particularly if you are paying for the service. Get your website URL into placements where not only is it mentioned, there is a hyperlink directly to your site. This will also benefit your link-building/SEO agenda.
• The observations above would also perhaps add weight to the argument in favour of a particular business pursuing a specific social media strategy.
• If you are going to use a PR agency, then choose wisely. Seek out ones that will suit your online agenda. Have they got specific experience or do they maybe specialise in online PR? Do they use Facebook and Twitter themselves? How credible looking is their own website?

A word on Radio and TV

While not specifically covered here, these media have similar difficulties in terms of the ‘disconnect’ issue and the ability of listeners/viewers to remember websites that have been mentioned.

In their favour however, is the fact that they are more engaging than press. Radio might also offer greater opportunities for someone to also be beside their computer while listening.

We were thrilled and honoured to be asked to speak at the September seminar for the Irish Women in Business last Tuesday night in the Osprey Hotel, Naas.

IWIB is a network that was set up by Tara Wilson-Black of Select Digital and it’s aimed particularly at start up businesses that are managed by women.  It holds regular networking events and seminar programmes for members. The atmosphere is always very relaxed and it makes for very interactive sessions as we found out first hand last night.   

Our topic was ‘Online Marketing’ and we covered areas such as Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click advertsing, email marketing and social media. We also gave some advice on what makes a good website.

About 30 people attended the event which was about 14 more than had signed up but there was plenty of room for everyone.

You can follow Irish Women in Business on Twitter and Facebook.

Of late, I’ve been doing a lot more designing and coding than I have in previous months and years. With this has come a lot of new skills and techniques but one thing that hasn’t changed and has become increasingly frustrating is getting our sites to look and work the same in Internet Explorer 6.

If you’re a web designer or developer reading this, you’ll have undoubtedly come across this headache and many of us have discussed it at different events as well as online. I quite regularly tweet my frustration and have read many similar tweets.

Many clients are unaware of the work that goes into making sites look the same across all browsers. The newer browsers (such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome and even IE8) are more standard and are easier to get looking consistent. It’s legacy browsers that cause us designers and developers the most problems and take up the most time testing and fixing, which can also add costs to a project.

Well, I think it’s time that we take a stand and really make a push to kill IE6 for good. According to Statcounter Global Stats, IE6 currently equates to 17% of all browsers around the world (8% for Ireland), and it’s losing about 1% per month. With a final push, we could finally get IE6 out of our lives forever!

What can we do?

Update Now
Well, if you’re an end user and you’re viewing this site with Internet Explorer 6, it’s time for you to upgrade… seriously! Most likely users of old browsers don’t know they are using an old browser and we’re waiting for the cycle of new computer purchases to actually rid the world of IE6.

Inform IE6 Users
As a designer / developer, there is something you can do. I recently came across Update Your Browser that has a little javascript file that you can include on your websites and it will detect the users browser and if it’s an old browser, it will display a simple and unobtrusive message to the user. This links back to their website and gives the user information on why they should upgrade and how to do it. I like the way this loads and looks like the information bar in IE6 so these users should notice it. I’ve seen similar type campaigns but none as simple and elegant as this one.

Spread The Word
If you’ve got a blog or use twitter/facebook, spread the word. Write a blog post, tell your followers, get people over to updateyourbrowser.net.

I felt it was time to give it a plug and see if we could get more designers and developers involved. I think we’ll approach clients about this as well and increase the IE6 users we can put this script in front of. I remember the death of IE4, IE5 and IE5.5 and I’m truly looking forward to seeing the back of IE6 for good. I’m already anticipating the next browser kill campaign when we’re looking to get more support for HTML5 but I’ll leave that talk for another day.

I’ve also had a little bit of a chat on twitter about a retirement bash for IE6 - there could be lots of fun around the send off plus lots of sponsorship opportunities. More on that down the line.

So, what do you think? Are you sick of IE6 yet? Will you use this script on your sites? When will you stop supporting it - 4% or less?

I know. ‘Twitter’ and ‘Late Late Show’ should not sit together in the same sentence. The former is a still-emerging micro-blogging technology that has captured the imagination of both IT types and the general population who want to join a wider ‘conversation’. The latter has been considered a great example of the deep malaise affecting more traditional media.

Ironically, on Friday night, Twitter helped play witness to a remarkable turnaround in the fortunes (albeit one swallow doesn’t make a summer) of the 47-year-old chat show dinosaur.

There was a considerable amount of tweeting all through Friday night but it still failed to officially ‘trend’. Most likely down to the fact that the tweets were spread across three hashtags (#latelate #latelateshow #lltub).

The perfect trend?

This was a fine example of where Twitter can really shine. The Late Late was a perfect Twitter trend as it had all of the following elements:

• A story that was developing ‘live’
• The entire Irish Twitter community had access to the event (assuming they wanted to participate, unlike say, a concert)
• It was highly topical anyway (new host)
• It was crying out for critical analysis
• It was - by Twitter standards - a local story
• A large segment of the Dublin Twitter community had been on the lash the night before at BTW in the Clarion Hotel and were therefore too tired to go out :)

So, what was the verdict from the Twitter community?

‘Dread’, ‘impending doom’, ‘weak guest line up’, ‘why Cowen?’ were the key themes in pre-show tweets. The new theme tune only added to that (but remember music is one of those rare things where ‘UNfamiliarity can breed contempt’, so maybe we need to hear it a few more times before deciding). However, after that, the messages were positive by a majority of probably of about 70 to 30 which is a stunning result really for RTE.

Guest by Guest Tweet Summaries

Brian Cowen

RT surprised everyone with the harsh line of questioning. Confident and maturely handled. Brian Cowen was rocked but then rallied well towards the end. His usual verbosity replaced with a much more direct speaking style that came across really well. The round of applause he got at the end was respectful (almost touching) and belied his 15% approval rating. Lots of positive tweets for both men, mixed with pops at the government, NAMA, etc.

Sharon Corr

There seemed a sense that people wanted her to do well but she didn’t. Pity. Pretty good song but weakish vocals and lacked a bit of presence. On the plus side she threw herself in at the deep end so maybe she’ll turn it around.

Brian McFadden

Some sympathy for Brian but overall view was that he should not be washing his dirty linen etc. New hairdo was also slated. Good questions by Ryan T.

Joan Collins

As always entertaining and as you’d expect lots of tweets re plastic surgery, putty and the like. The host handled it well again.

Cherie Blair

Opposite to Sharon in that people seemed to want to dislike her but they just can’t. Seems like a highly intelligent likeable lady. Mr T tried using the 4 letter word (Iraq) but was swotted away a bit too easily. Great one liner though re the passport for the daughter.

David Gray

50-50 on this guy on whether he still has it or not. Lots of fun tweets re his ‘shakey head’.

Saoirse Ronan

Closest it came to Tubridy Tonight was this interview, maybe a little too light and some inane questions but it was still kind of fun. Very likeable young lady who will do very well was the Twitter consensus. Her only PR blunder was her plug for Walkers crisps. Sharp intake of breath from the audience.

Niall and Gillian Quinn

Good interview to finish off though lacked some depth maybe. Niall got the EVIL look of the night from GQ (cool initials, btw) for his inference re the night they met. Very funny stuff. I still think this guy is a legend for giving away STG£1M to charity from his testimonial game. Little blip at the end with the band but it didn’t spoil what was a great opening show.

So, Ryan Tubridy’s breakfast on Saturday tasted very good indeed. Spare a thought for his invisible production team who also must have put in a lot of hard slog to get the quality line up and great questions to ask.

Now, the question is: can they keep it going? It will be tough keeping the guest quality high and avoiding the ‘filler’ guests (you know who they are…) that were such a feature of the previous incarnation.

Tune in next week on RTE and on Twitter (might we be so bold to recommend the #latelate version of the hashtag?) to see how this story develops. And… we’ll all love that theme tune by Christmas :)

Oh yeah…

Tweet of the night came from @reverbstudios

“Holy shit, what’s all this Late Late show spam in my twitter..I’ve a good mind to unfollow you all..!”

What do you think of our new website? We’ve just launched and would welcome your feedback.

We have a new portfolio section and also a case study section where you can view more details about the type of work that we do.

Our blog is also new so check back regularly for updates or sign up to our RSS Feed.

Our latest creation went live yesterday. It’s a professional services website for a Chartered Surveyor based in Navan and Dublin.

This was a great project to work on. We have a long standing relationship with Pat McGovern and his team and this is the second site that we have built for them.

Pat provided us with some of the best photographic imagery we’ve ever worked with and we think this has ensured that the end product looks very visually appealing. An extra investment on the client’s part but I think you’ll agree it’s worth it.

Have a look and see what you think www.mcgovernsurveyors.ie

We’ve seen articles in the past with over 30 tips for writing content. Slight overkill we think. Here are the 7 that we push with our clients.

1. Prioritise quality over quantity. Your content should be readable, relevant and reviewed regularly. Don’t spend time writing content that no one will ever end up reading.
2. Plan the layout of the content.  The more content you have on your website, the more important it is to plan the layout. The hierarchy needs to be intuitive to a visitor and content needs to be easy to find. If they need to spend time figuring out your site, this will mean they will either leave or at best will spend less time reading what you want them to read.
3. Stay focused on your online goals.  Write content that supports these goals.
4. Do not use the full width of the screen.  Wider screen sizes are now being used in more browsers.  Don’t be tempted to use the space for text.  It is just too wide for the human eye to comfortably cope with, so visitors will not read the full text.
5. Avoid using excessive links.  Particularly, in the body text. They can distract from the flow of your text. At an absolute minimum, avoid having them in an early paragraph unless absolutely necessary.
6. Edit, Sub-edit, re-edit. Do your best to eliminate superfluous words. Pages with lots of text tend to be read less or only scan-read.
7. Keep an eye on keywords. Our advice is not to write text specifically aimed at search terms.  It will appear unnatural.  It’s better to write good quality content and then review it to see if some words can be added or changed to improve the optimisation for search engines.