The social network software that is available online has meant that however comfortable you are using the internet and the products that are found there, you can still take advantage of the benefits that are on offer. Whether you have the confidence to create the ideal network for yourself all on your own, or you could do with a helping hand every step of the way and wouldn’t dare to create anything online all on your own, you will find that the services that are available will give you the correct level of assistance that you require.

If you are a seasoned developer then you can choose to go it alone and select the DIY method, where you can set up your network and have it running smoothly and efficiently and the way you want it to. Once you have had a look at the benefits that are on offer and the simplicity that is part and parcel of creating and setting up your own network, you can choose your own web address and get cracking right away.

There is always help on hand in the form of a help desk that is open to answer your questions right around the clock, whilst the video tutorial library can be accessed before you start so that you can get an idea of what work is required from you. If you are still left feeling out of your depth then you can decide to get some assistance setting the network up, or you can go even further and get the five star treatment, where the network is designed for you.

If you feel that you need help setting up a business social network then plenty is available, as an expert can work with you to setup, design and launch your social network. If you don’t have the time to spare setting up a social network or would just like the task completed for you, then you can take advantage of the concierge service where all the work is done for you for a small fee.

Whatever level of assistance you require the choice is up to you, but whichever path you take you will still end up with the same result. A slick looking, ultra professional social network will be the result of the personal support given and consequently you will have a unique and fully customised social network, where you can draw in and build your network of business clients.

All UK businesses are looking to cut costs, spend less and hang on to their customers. But while certain expenditure can most certainly be contracted or cut altogether, whether a corporate golf day or lunch time visits to Marks And Spencer, there’s one area that many businesses look to cut when I recommend they increase their budget spend, especially in times like these.

Internet Marketing will help your business by attracting more customers through visibility.

Furthermore, as businesses stop trading you will need to be accessible, easily found on the web and listed high in Google, if you are going to capitalise on gaining their clients.

For those of you without a company website – where have you been?

Your business not only NEEDS a website but a professional looking, highly functional website should be at the hub of every business marketing plan.  Not having a company website is almost as bad as having a badly designed website!

For those businesses with a good website, you need to promote it with an internet marketing strategy. Internet Marketing should be responsive to your business and sector requirements, but must always include a strong strategic link building focus and an emphasis on ranking as high as possible in Google for your specifically targeted keywords.  Inbound links, topic relevancy and site authority all go towards ranking your website higher.

Now, if you are already employing an internet marketing consultant or company to manage your online marketing but are not getting a ROI (Return On Investment) or new business from this service, then it’s time to question whether they are doing a good job!

Many so-called SEO companies have sprung up in the past 2-3 years in the UK are not experts in the field of web marketing.  Most use automated tools and send pages of next to useless data showing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), but this is not going to help you or your business without a managed strategy and analysis.

What your business needs is an internet marketing program being managed by experts who manually monitor and recommend what is right for your business to acquire more visibility, more traffic, more leads, and ultimately more customers; and the most important consideration is to analyse the results.  To do so, your online marketing strategy will need to harness the power of web analytics.

Armed with a good website analytics tool and an expert internet marketing team to build, monitor, manage and offer recommendations, your internet marketing program will help you  to beat your competitors and survive the recession.

To help start the year off on the right path, here is some free internet marketing advice to help you get and stay ahead of your business competitors.

Free Advice Free Offers
Entice your website and blog visitors by offering special incentives; and there’s no better way to grab someone’s attention than to include the word FREE!

Offer free advice, free postage, free information.  Things you know your competitors are charging their customers for.  Be honest, and traffic will grow.

Search Engine Optimisation is vital to your business success in 2009

You need to constantly market your business online.  Keep regularly updating your website and business blog. Fresh content keeps both the search engines and potential customers interested and aware of your products and services.

Set up regular Google Alerts for your company name and any products and services with recognisable or trademarked names.  This way you can monitor what is being written about your business, good or bad!

Similarly, www.IceRocket.com & www.Serph.com are websites that allow you to track who is publishing copy that may affect you, your name and your business.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
An ongoing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) program is vital in 2009.  Don’t think a one-off ‘makeover’ is going to be enough.  The search engines are looking for your website and blog to continually add relevance, authority and good quality in-bound links.

Furthermore, once you start to receive high ranking for popular keywords, your competitors will also be attempting to leapfrog you in the rankings.

Target Potential Customers
Always target Google, and continue to use Google as a focus, for all your SEM (Search Engine Marketing) but never forget there is a target audience waiting for you on other search engines and directories such as Yahoo, MSN, DMOZ, AllTheWeb, Ask, Alta Vista and AOL, to name a few.

The Internet is global but don’t forget local business is as important, and in some cases easier to convert. Local search strategies should include geo-targeted paid search and natural search engine optimisation campaigns. Geo-targeted keywords restrict campaigns to consumers in specific areas where your company is looking to improve its reputation and increase sales. Include ‘landing pages’ that are specific to campaigns and promote single products and services to increase conversion rates.

Website Traffic Analysis
All focused internet marketing and website development activity will need to be analysed if you are to maximise the results.  The more information you can gather using website traffic analysis, the better.  Many traffic analysis software programs are free.  But many of these programs offer very little in the way of useful information.

We offer clients a free website stats program by AWstats but employ a much more powerful tool for serious in depth analytics.

Internet Marketing Plan
Finally, it is very important to have an internet marketing plan that you can  refer to, whether you undertake the work yourself or outsource to an internet marketing consultancy such as Buzzin Fly.

An internet marketing plan should set out the aims and goals of the program.  I also recommend a quarterly meeting that should discuss the program and provide results and recommendations for the next quarter.

2009 is going to be a difficult year for many companies, especially small businesses and SMEs.  But if you are looking for more revenue consider an internet marketing strategy as an  essential part of your marketing budget spend.

While I was talking to him, I was checking the shop he had problems with. I wouldn’t have bought from it. Here’s how I checked it:-

1. Check the Page

Open the front page of the site in one browser window and then use another window to get to a page that ought to be secure (the payment/checkout page is my usual one). Look at them both. Do either of them show any logos from well-known payment (Barclays, RBS, Protx, …) or security-checking services (thawte – who else?)? That’s not entirely reliable, but it’s usually a good sign because those companies attack people using their marks without permission.

Look at the payment/checkout page – does the address in the address bar start “https”? If so, is the padlock in the browser status bar (usually bottom right) closed? That usually means it’s encrypted with a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate.

2. Check the Certificate

Open the certificate details. In Firefox-based browsers, double-click the padlock, then click the “View Certificate” button. Then pick “Subject” in the second list box. Usually, it looks like this:-

Basic Certificate Screenshot

Some shops now use Extended Validation certificates and give a bit more information. Here’s one from a train company:-

Extended Validation Screenshot

3. Check the Registrations

By this point, the payment processing and actual transaction are looking pretty good. Finally, I check the recipient. Find the business details on the web shop. Does it include a geographic address? If it contains a company registration number, look it up on the Companies House website.

Then I find the business details on the domain names – you can use CoolWhois to look up domain names. If any of the addresses or numbers don’t match (Website, SSL Certificate, Whois), then I call them to ask why their website says they’re based in Bristol but their domain name is registered to Bolton. If they don’t answer messages, or – worse – the domain name says “Non-trading Individual” and the address has been omitted from the public listing, I give up on them and look for another shop. There’s no point securely paying someone that you can never reach if there’s a problem.

4. Buy Stuff and Check the Statements

All being well, I then buy stuff and check my credit card statement each month before I pay it. I think any web shop owner (or webmaster – I help some people with this sort of thing) should be taking care of the basics above. Do your shops measure up?

Despite the above checks, I can only remember not buying something online once in the last year. A couple of times, I’ve worked through the above steps and it’s changed which shop I bought from – and I’m pretty sure it saved me from losing £400 on one purchase.

For the technically-minded, Changes in Spam Levels this week Posted by simonw illustrates the level of disruption and may grow an interesting discussion from server managers – it seems the reduction is less than the 75% reported in some news services, but still significant.

This is great news for all good internet users. It’s disappointing if the spam hosting service won’t have to pay any of the costs they’ve inflicted on other computer users in some way. The only practical negative that I’ve noticed so far is that much of the stopped spam was pretty easy to identify and filter out, so the reduction in spam reaching my “unsure” mailbox hasn’t been anything like 50%. Still, less spam hitting the filters means less computer power used, which means less electricity and network data transfer used, which means lower costs for us. Yippee!

And finally, I smiled at this comment over on the WebmasterWorld discussion:-

“Our spam email has dropped so much in the past 2 days that I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with our email accounts.”

In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money – but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others?

If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?

In most cases the design company have delivered exactly what they had agreed to do.  Most website design companies are simplt that – design companies.  They don’t offer or include any form of post-launch marketing, and is some cases the ‘design’ of a website doesn’t even include much time or consideration to the correct development of a commerically viable website.

Therefore, it is very important that when considering your budget for a new website – be it a redesign or brand new, always set some money aside for online or internet marketing.

Marketing your website is essential if you want to attract visitors and get noticed.

There are many low cost techniques you can use to drive traffic to your website, including getting listed in the search engines, advertising to a mailing list or exchanging reciprocal links with other websites.

It’s no good spending £1,000 or £10,000 on a company website if potential customers cannot find your website or are completely unaware of your website or business.  Whether you’re launching a new website, or just want to increase traffic to your existing website, it’s important to plan your marketing activities.

Always allocate a Website Marketing budget & plan for online business success

Choose the marketing techniques which will be most effective in meeting your objectives.

Here are 3 online marketing techniques to consider:

Paid Inclusion – Buy keywords on search engines.  This is the only way to guarantee your website will be listed on the first page of major search engines such as Google

Email Newsletters – Run an email campaign if you want to alert customers to a new product or promotions. But be aware, it is illegal to send unsolicited emails to personal email accounts.  If you are looking to boost sales from existing customers then an email newsletter is a good way to encourage repeat visits and build excellent customer relationships.

Blogs – Start a business or corporate blog.  Write honestly and openly about your business sector.  Try not to overly promote your own products and services but develop an informative channel offering an independent view.  In time, due to the quality of your blog, you will receive traffic and a loyal following; a percentage of whom may then become customers.

I strongly believe that every business can prosper from having a professional website and that either writing for a blog or promoting their business products and services on other blogs will increase awareness and sales.  But to generate online business success you must consider marketing your website or blog as well as building one.

As early as the mid-1990s I was taking part in meetings and presentations with a company called MAGEX who was attempting to sell their idea and ultimately their software, to the music industry.  The software allowed someone to legally buy an mp3 and download the file to a specific computer.  The track would not play on another device and therefore once bought, could not be copied or shared.

This concept had its limitations but the main essence was to get the record industry to stop wasting their time and money fighting illegal downloading of music, and concentrate on how best the music industry could embrace the Internet and the phenomemnon of peer-to-peer sharing sites such as Napster.

Remember, this was a time long before MySpace, YouTube and other social networking sites.

Universal, Sony and BMG were among representatives at those meetings who simply couldn’t see past how much money they were losing, and not what they could gain, and moreover, didn’t want to consider what would happen to them in the future.

I beleive what I witnessed in the space of one year or so, was successful businessmen not wanting to step outside of their comfort zone.

The result was that the music industry chose to ignore the changing patterns of music consumption; and only recently, ten years later, are they embracing the Internet through social media websites and free downloads; a lead that was given to them by small independent labels and artists who, if truth be known, need the money more than they do!

I felt engaged to write this post after reading that Mick Jagger, lead singer with The Rolling Stones, has been invited to help the European Commission (EC) to draw up a report on e-commerce and online shopping.

Jagger will be part of a committee (including Steve Jobs of Apple) who will advise the EC on the issues surrounding the online shopping sector, including a particular focus on online selling and downloading of music through eCommerce websites.

Neelie Kroes, a European Union competition commissioner told the BBC that one of the points to be raised will be why it is not as easy to buy music files online as it is to have a CD shipped around Europe will be under investigation.

To tie this in with the purpose of this blog – how to generate online business success – the business lesson I learnt by way of my first-hand experience with MAGEX and the music industry in the 1990s was that if you are successful in business there are at least two reasons why you should look for change and not stagnation:

1. Success should breed more success – look for other ways to expand your business and increase your success further instead of allowing your competitors to gain the upperhand.

2. Every millionaire I have ever spoken to always has a story to tell of when they made a ‘make or break’ decision.  They NEVER tell the story of how they played safe and took no risks or that once becoming a millionaire they are not looking to increase theor wealth.

And if your business is a success you may want to reward yourself with a cruise holiday?

1. JavaScript or other crawler-unfriendly navigation that may impede indexing

This one is best avoided at design-time, by including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Level A in the design brief, but if you’ve ended up with JavaScript-based navigation on your site (check by doing “View Source” and searching for the code for your home page link and so on – if you can find it, then it’s probably not javascript) and it’s based on some template system, a webmaster can probably do a whole-site edit to put the navigation links in the page properly – or at least add a useful <noscript> tag.

2. Navigation that buries important pages within the site architecture.

The structure of the website’s files and the structure of the link menus do not need to match, so if there’s a page that you feel is important, get your webmaster to add it to the navigation links across the whole site.

3. Duplicate “pages” getting indexed under multiple URLs.

This usually happens for one of two reasons: one is inappropriately-parked domains, which is mistake 6 below and often fairly easy to fix; the other is a misbehaving web application, which you’ll need to get a programmer to fix.

You can do a simple test of your web application by starting at your homepage and following links to a particular page; then open a new browser window and try to reach the same page by different links (or a site search) and compare the address bars (the bit of your browser showing http://) – do they match? If not, you’ve got this problem.

4. No keyword phrase focus in the content or conversely, keyword phrase stuffing

You can use a good word-counter on the text to see how common different keywords and keyphrases, or use the “webmaster tools” section of some search engines to see what they’re focusing on.

Keyword-stuffing can be fairly easy to see. If you “View Source” on a page and there’s a large block of keyword-intensive text somewhere in it that doesn’t appear it when viewed in a browser, then it’s probably stuffing. Many sites regard stuffing as a sort of spam, so you don’t want to be found doing this.

To fix these problems, rewrite the page text appropriately.

5. An optimized home page, but that’s it

Repeat your checks from problem 4 on a few pages other than the home page to discover whether you suffer from this. Also, see whether your website statistics show search engine visitors arriving at a variety of different pages (these are sometimes called “Entry Page” statistics).

6. Additional domains owned by the company are not properly redirected

If you usually use .co.uk, but you also have a .com domain, try visiting a random page on your website, then click in the address bar and replace the .co.uk with .com – what happens?

If the page is Not Found, then your domains aren’t properly redirected and you need a Redirect adding to the second one.

If the page displays but the address doesn’t change itself back, then your domains are probably pointing at the same webspace but aren’t properly redirected, which will mean you’re probably making mistake 3 above. Usually, the simplest way to fix this is with a conditional redirect. On Apache webservers, you can add a .htaccess file containing something like:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]

That even works on BT Business web hosting, by the way. If it doesn’t work, try asking your web hosting provider to enable mod_rewrite for you or ask them to suggest how to achieve the same result.

The above list of mistakes was published on Search Engine Land last week. The correction methods are all things used by my webmaster cooperative.

Make a bigger web footprint by managing an ongoing internet marketing campaign.

Make sure your developers are well versed in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  Don’t be surprised if they’re not!

Many companies offer website design & development, while others simply concentrate on online marketing.  It is preferable to deal with one company who are experts in both, or at least will oversee the whole project, as both are necessary for a successful eCommerce business.

It’s no good having the best looking eCommerce website on the Internet, offering the best prices in the UK, if no one can find your site!

To be successful online, make your eCommerce website visible

Since a large majority of your new customers are going to be introduced to your website via a search engine such as Google or a directory such as Yahoo, you will necessarily need to spend time and money on getting your eCommerce site seen in the major search engines.

It is difficult to break into competitive online markets, but the longer you lave it the harder it becomes. You can either hire a professional internet marketing company to manage this for you or carry out Internet marketing by yourself.

Associate your web site with others providing complimentary products or services

This will again help you in increasing your web presence both for search engines and for your customers.