I was looking at Rand Fishkins’ thread on SEOmoz today, where he was asking
What’s the most effective web marketing tactic you’ve seen or used that very few people know about?

In the article which is a pro user thread only, web professionals were sharing some of their lesser known tips for marketing. Of course, you can find any information out by doing a little diligent research on your desired topic. It’s always good to get a few snippets from the masters though.

One of my own tips for sharing content is this..

Remarketing your Blog Posts

So, you wrote your blog article, and spent some considerable time finding just the right words and the right images, maybe even creating graphics, curating links and adding great information to wow and engage your audience. You publish, nothing much happens, and then, you let it die. Your article just sits there on the blog hoping that someone might stumble across it.  They may not! So what do you do now?  You remarket it.

If your blog is new, not yet ranking well or a specific phrase, your article can just disappear. There are around 2 million blog posts written every single day.  So if your’s isn’t hitting the mark or you posted it at the wrong time of day it simply won’t have the desired impact.

When I write an article, I share the link on Facebook,  Twitter,  and Google Plus immediately.  Then a few hours later,  I will share the link again, with a slightly different title.  It’s ok to share things multiple times, just let people know it’s a repost.  That way, the audience who do follow you dont waste their time visiting the article twice.

Timing is key for re-marketing

Remember, the likelihood of all of your audience seeing your blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, or  G+ posts is unlikely.  So, you have to give your audience as much opportunity to see the article as possible.   You can choose the optimum time to do your marketing by taking a look at your Google Analytics stats. Analytics will reveal to you when your audience is online and when they look at your blog/website.  Find the optimum times and market accordingly.  If you don’t have Google Analytics set up on your website, give us a call.

Plug & Play - Using plugins to share your knowledge.

In recent years bloggers have determined new ways of keeping people on their site for longer.  Your blog may be a vehicle to drive traffic or sales for your business, so the more engaged readers are, the better the chance of doing business with them.  So, search around for plugins that highlight other related posts that you have written.  Once people land on your blog, you need to feed them with articles that will lead to conversions.

WordPress users often use plugins suchas YARPP or Related Posts Thumbnails.  Of course, there are other options for other platforms.  If you use Blogger,  then try Related Posts Widget for Google Blogger – v2  or if you use the TypePad platform then there is Link Within.  All these plugins and widgets help you to recycle content that otherwise might not get a view, especially if it has dropped down the search engine results pages.

Benefits of re-marketing your blog

• Over time, you can build up large numbers of social shares by re-marketing your old blog posts.
• This keeps you visible in the mind of your audience ,  great when you’re suffering from writers block.

Use your Mailing List

You do have a mailing list don’t you?  Good, use it then!  Just because you wrote a bunch of posts last month, doesn’t mean that those posts had the maximum exposure that they could have had.  Take the opportunity to reach out to your subscribers  and remind them about all the great content that is available for them.  To make an analogy, re-marketing is a bit like Mothers Day, “Sometimes people need to be reminded that you love them”.

Do you have questions about remarketing? Do you want to make more of your Blog/website? Need help harnessing Social Media and improving your cutomer engagement. Want to set up a mailing list and reach out to potential customers?

Contact Phil Gregory at Zero-1 today.

Email:    phil.gregory@zero1.co.uk

t: 0845 867 6391

w: http://www.zero1.co.uk 

Question

Are you remarketing, How do you do yours? leave a comment below and slet us know.

The post Remarketing your Blog Posts appeared first on Zero-1.

Sometimes, a site’s problems are rooted in the site design, others in stock management but ultimately such problems can have a negative effect on SEO factors.

A common scenario is that the company has had their website upgraded to an online store by another agency. For a number of reasons they have not been happy with the results they are getting and have sought a second opinion or new solution.

More often than not, the client has many products in their online store, all without the required, basic level of information to assist potential customers in finding, and ultimately buying the product.

In this post, I will attempt to lay out some basic points that business owners should consider before embarking on building an e commerce site, and ones to bear in mind when seeking a return on their investment.

Web Site Plan / Web Site Audit

If your haven’t yet got a website yet, you need to engage some expert help. Do not rush into choosing the first company you encounter.

Most companies will give you a free estimate, if possible, meet the company, get a feel for them and how they operate. Trust is an important factor in choosing a web agency. Talk about your needs, their experience, and your expectations. Get the agency to make a formal proposal, with a detailed site plan, explanations of work to be carried out with proposed timings and costs all detailed. You can meet with several companies, choose the one that you feel will best suit your needs.

Work with an Agency like Zero1 to help you plan your website

Have an existing website?

If you already have a website and feel that it needs attention to increase visitors, sales or both, then you are going to need a website audit. Again, most web site audits are free, so take advantage of the expertise of your chosen agency. They will be able to identify problems with our site that most business owners simply aren’t aware of.

A good web development agency will provide you with a detailed breakdown of your site’s existing layout, how it might be improved. Errors within the site that might be affecting performance and most importantly how to improve traffic and conversions.

Poor Website Design Hurts Sales

Often the poor design of an e-commerce website can be hampering it’s effectiveness at retaining visitors and stopping them from making that all important purchase or submitting a callback request. Perhaps the site is old and requires a redesign from the ground up , or maybe it just needs some tweaks. Whatever the situation, it is important that you open a dialogue with your agency. Talking to the Designer and Marketing Officer is going to be crucial in getting the best results from your site.

Before doing this ask yourself the questions,

“Am I a Designer?” or “Do I have experience in online design and marketing?”

If the answer is “no”, then you will most likely be best served by listening to the designers’ Ideas. Don’t be tempted to overrule their suggestions simply because they aren’t to your taste.

A good web agency will produce a design for a website based on market factors such as statistics of visitor traffic and purchasing habits, not on emotion and sentimentality. Business owners often overlook that, and insist that a design follow their ideas to the letter. Remember, you are not building the website for yourself, but for your customers.

Stock Control Issues can damage your ability to sell online

Most e-commerce software contains some form of import facility from your Stock Control software. If at all possible, get your stock control software in order before exporting the data out and putting it online.

If your stock database has empty or incomplete fields, then so will your web store.

Once you import your product data into your online store. Here’s a checklist to work through

• Product Names: Are they logical from a customers point of view?
• Product Codes: Do you have them?
• Product Descriptions: Do your products have descriptions? If not, why not?
• Product Images: Does each product have a good image? Are those images tempting enough to sell the product?
• Categories: Does this Product belong in a category? Is your category structure both simple and logical?

By getting your product database in order you set a precedent for future efficiency, the time and effort invested in doing this will mean that it doesn’t have to be repeated for your online store, and you wont be working with two differing, and often confusing data sets. Zero-1 build e-commerce sites using Magento. We are Magento Silver Partners, our designers and developers are Magento Certified.  Magento will tie directly to your stock database and even your shop till.

Great content helps sell products

Web promotion is a constantly changing landscape. Business owners have to meet the criteria that Search Engines set if they want their stores to be competitive online.

Changes to the Google Algorithm means that Google favours sites that provide great content, as opposed to those with thousands of links from irrelevant websites.

The DT Leathers Website product page displays good images, a strong product description. Clear “Add To Cart” button. Customer feedback scores and Social sharing.

So, even if you have thousands of products. The task ahead is to write good product descriptions for each of them. If you have lots of similar products, try to make those descriptions different. It’s a hard, time consuming task, and can be both boring and daunting, but when you do it, you prove to yourself and your team that it can be done, whilst teaching yourself a valuable lesson in really understanding how to sell your products online.

Try to add value to your product descriptions, make them special, unique and complete. Do not be tempted to copy and paste product descriptions for the manufacturer website. If you do this, rather than benefiting the site, you will most likely end up being penalised by google for having duplicate content.

You are the Expert in your field

You are the expert on your products, so prove it to your customers. The name,  with a blurry photo, just won’t cut it these days, especially if your competitor has a better photo, description and price.

If you follow these simple guidelines your site will be ready to add an intensive SEO campaign to the mix. Being ready before you begin your SEO campaigns should give you a significant advantage over competitor sites who may not have taken these precautionary steps.

The post Preparing Your E-commerce Website for Battle appeared first on Zero-1.

It doesn’t matter that all the market traders are calling out to you, urging you to stop, browse and have a look around. That can be an irritating distraction that you simply don’t have time for, right?

Marketplace – Old school or digital

Social Media is the new Town Market

Over the last few years we have seen businesses rush to create  accounts with the social media giants Facebook and Twitter. Smaller companies have begun to follow suit, drawn to the potential of these monolithic social media platforms and the promise of what the perceive as “free advertising”.

It seems as though ‘every man and his dog‘ have a page on Facebook or a profile on Twitter, often both.  This is fine in principle, it sure feels great to know that we are living in a world where we are all getting connected,  and that the little guy now has a voice.

However, if you are a small business, the question is,

“How do you get your message across using these platforms when there’s just as much competition online as there is on the high street”?

In the traditional market place, traders employ all kinds of tips and tricks to get you to stop at their stall.  Such as the way they organise their stall, the prices, the way they display price lists, special offers, and most distinctive of all
“Their call to action”, IE the way they shout out about their products.

Many Businesses don’t understand how to use Social Media

They seem to think, “Hey this is a marketplace, my business is my stall, so what do stall holders do?  ”Shout“!
Once everyone starts shouting,  how do you get your message heard above all that noise?

The first thing is to stop shouting. The discerning customer is always surveying the landscape for quality,  and you don’t have to shout to use social media effectively.   Shouting, or only posting links to your product range, on Social Media Platforms is the same as those annoying Viagra emails that you get in your email inbox.  It’s the same as those flyers you get through the door advertising the next Burger Joint or Kebab House.  Put simply, Shouting your message out on Facebook or Twitter is SPAM. If you are doing this, you are spamming people. You are most likely irritating people, and you are even more likely to be ignored. Stop Spamming people, they don’t like it.

Stop Spamming people on Social Media

Build Relationships using Twitter

Instead of having a Tweet stream full of links, that people may or may not be interested in. Make a statement about something relevant.  Making a statement that interests your target audience is more likely to get a response than just sending them a link saying “go to my website”.  Answer their questions, be useful. Establish yourself as “someone who knows“.

You don’t have to act weird to be different.

Here’s a brief example of how to use Twitter correctly.

Engage with your followers

Engage with your followers

All you have to do is engage with the people you follow and the people who follow you. It’s called “Social Media” for a reason, you have to be Sociable.  Now that you have got the conversation going, don’t hold back. That person just approached you, find out who they are.  Just looking over their Twitter stream will give you some valuable insight into who they are and what they like.   Is there a way you can help them?  Every time you help someone in a public sphere  your followers see this, the followers of the person you are helping, see this too.  You are increasing your influence.

Of course there’s only so much you can say  each day, and only so much people can take in, so limit the amount that you actually spend using social media.

Business owners, already want to spend less time on Social Media: Image snapshot from Vertical Response: http://goo.gl/liCzb

Five Points to get organised with Social Media.

1) Why not build a schedule?  Factor in an hour or two to gather up useful things to tweet about that reflect your company ethos. This might be things that relate to your product, it might be factual statements, it’s ok to post occasional links to your site or blog content, just dont do it everytime you post an update.

2) Post titbits, what I mean by this is, entice people to look at your content.  Don’t just use social media to post links to products, use social media to create interest about your blog, which will help build your reputation as an authority in your field

3) Post photos. Most of us have smart phones, so you can use them to post product images, images of your daily work, that helps build trust with your customers and potential leads. Try setting up an Instagram account. But again, don’t spam it, be natural.

4) What?  You don’t have a blog? Can you see me rolling my eyes? Talk to Zero1 about getting a properly built business blog.  you are going to need a blog to provide more information about your products and services.

5) Share the load.  Are you the only person in your business who can contribute to your social media campaigns?  If you spilt the sourcing of content into small chunks, you can delegate it to other members of staff. They can gather the content for you. Then you get editorial control about what goes out publicly. This way you are harnessing the creative abilities of every member of your team.

Is there anything you’d like to add? Share your Twitter or other social media tips with us by leaving a comment.

The post Business: For Social Media Results – Stop Shouting! appeared first on Zero-1.

The Home Boutique already had an E-commerce website.  Whilst the site was certainly attractive in design, it lacked the right ingredients to drive sales. ZERO-1 specialise in E-commerce. We have been building eCommerce websites since the early days of the web, so we know exactly what works and what doesn’t. That’s why we work with the multi award winning e-Commerce platform Magento.

Magento not only provides a truly robust and secure E-commerce platform, it delivers seamless data for your business management.

The Home Boutique

Having E-commerce functionality doesn’t mean that you have to miss out on clean stylish design though.  Magento is fully customisable and standards compliant.  It even offers integration with WordPress, so if you have a company blog, you don’t have to lose it when upgrading to Magento.

Client Comment

“Arron and his team at ZERO-1 are approachable and friendly. With us having a short deadline to work to ZERO-1 worked extremely fast and efficiently to ensure that this was met. I found that they exceeded all my expectations and would recommend them to anyone wanting a professionally designed and engineered website”

Kelly and Gilda The Home Boutique.

If your business is running an E-commerce platform that simply isn’t performing you really should consider coming to talk to the experts here at ZERO-1.  We will give you a full and detailed site analysis in which we will outline how we could improve your search engine visibility and your online sales.

The post Buxton Boutique Makes Smart Move to Magento appeared first on Zero-1.

Where to start?

Before you really start to look for ‘Magento Experts’ either via a hosting service or a Magento developer, take the time to cover the easy stuff.

The obvious is often overlooked – configure Magento

Some very simple steps in Magento will help ensure you are not paying for a solution provider or hosting company to make a couple of simple tweaks.

• Turn on CSS & JS file compilation
• Turn on Flat Catalog Category & Product
• Turn Logging off
• Don’t go overboard on new Magento extensions – unless you already know that they won’t hog your resources

Server optimisation

The post How fast can Magento really run? appeared first on Zero-1.

Magento’s Buy X Get Y Free

An often largely disappointing realisation for our customers is this feature. When clients see this feature they will often relate it to major UK high street promotions usually offered by Boots or Superdrug. Giving great incentives to offer bundle discounts from a range of products. Where Magento falls short is that X and Y have to be the same product! So you can buy 3 tubes of toothpaste and get one of them free. This limits the scope of the promotion drastically, given this is offering nothing more than price breaks.

Customer insight wins out

In listening to our customers and researching the most effective way to promote your products, we have developed the following 2 Magento extensions which extend Magento’s inbuilt promotion system greatly.

• Buy X Get the Cheapest Free (does just that, and a whole lot more)
• Buy X For Y (where Y is a fixed price, never done in Magento before)

What can these Magento extensions achieve that Magento core cannot?

• Set Price bundle promotions
• Buy 2 Get 1 Free
• Buy 1 Get 1 Half Price
• Buy one Get 25% off the second – or any percentage

We have had over 100 emails from potential customers asking questions to confirm whether certain specific promotions are possible, and are delighted to say, YES has been the answer to every one!

The post The missing Magento promotions! appeared first on Zero-1.

Over the many years that we have been working on SEO projects, we have found this to be common complaint, time and time again.

Very often a new and exciting project  such as getting your company’s first website online can create a real buzz. Sadly this buzz is more often than not a short-lived. How many times have you heard the claim:

“We will get you onto the first page of Google in one week”

Only for the company to take your money and then disappear into the ether? Our clients often tell us of the numerous calls they receive from companies claiming to be able to perform such miracles. The truth of the matter is that companies who make such claims only care about the numbers. They will tell you whatever you want to hear to get your business. If they can sign up a hundred new customers in a week they are happy.

Here at Zero-1, we believe in creating a stable and long lasting relationship with all of our clients. That’s why we don’t make outlandish promises. Achieving good search engine results takes time, and hard work.  There are no legitimate quick fixes.

SEO help? Zero-1 work with the client

Zero-1 can provide the SEO help to improve your search engine rankings. We can’t wave a magic wand and take all your troubles away, but we can help you plan and organise your website in a way that will improve your search engine visibility.

You know your business, you are experts at what you do. We know how to promote and market websites, together that’s a powerful combination of knowledge.

Content is King

Ever since the early days of the internet, websites with the best content tend to perform better than their competitors.
After all you want to give your customers the most rewarding experience possible. That experience has to result in leads and sales.

Zero-1 will work closely with you, to create a structured site that delivers relevant information and leads to enquiries and sales.
Contact Zero-1 to see how we can make your website fit for business.

The post Is your website under-performing? SEO help from Zero-1 appeared first on Zero-1.

Magento has some very good core functionality for those looking to target mobile users with a unique Magento mobile theme. Rather than operating two separate stores or websites to accommodate two unique themes, we can use Design exceptions within the Magento admin.

Step 1 – Configure your Magento admin design tab

Log into your Magento admin and navigate to System -> Configuration. Click the Design tab on the left. The 2nd box down should be Themes, open this and if it is setup like the Magento default your existing theme will be set as the Default value.

The Add Exception button is the feature we are interested in. This allows us to enter a Matched Expression which Magento will compare with the browsers user agent and if it matches, it will display the theme we specify in the Value box.

Step 2 – Decide which devices to target

You can enter as many expressions as you like, separated by a pipe symbol (|), depending on which devices you want to target. To target the most popular devices such as Android and iPhones, the following code will work:

iPhone|iPod|Safari Mobile|Android

There are many more mobile platforms, as you are probably aware. You can pick and choose from the following to target devices as you see fit, most are self explanatory:

iPhone|iPod|BlackBerry|Pre|Palm|Googlebot-Mobile|mobi|Safari Mobile|Windows Mobile|Android|Opera Mini|mobile

I would recommend excluding mobile as this only seems to affect larger tablets, such as the iPad. Tablet users should be comfortable enough with your standard, desktop-sized theme.

Enter the name of your mobile theme into the value box and hit Save Config.

Flush Magento Cache and visit your website on a mobile device and you will see your new mobile-friendly Magento theme!

The Magento community package has been bundled with a basic mobile theme – simply called iphone – since version 1.5 and this is constantly being improved and optimised.

P.S. If you don’t have a mobile device to hand for testing you can easily install a browser addon such as “Ultimate User Agent Switcher” for Chrome to trick your Magento website into thinking you are using an Android or iPhone device.

The post Enabling a Magento mobile theme appeared first on Zero-1.

“The Like button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website.”

You will be editing two Magento template files to achieve this, one layout XML file and one PHTML file.

Step 1 –  locate, or create, local.xml

app/design/frontend/default/[your_template]/layout/local.xml

Insert the following code somewhere in between the opening and closing <layout> tag.

{code type=xml}

]]>



{/code}

Facebook recommends that the Javascript for the like button be inserted immediately after the opening <body> tag, fortunately Magento already includes an after_body_start reference which we can easily insert the code into.

The <action method="setText"> allows us to insert any text on the page, the CDATA tag ensures that anything inside it is not parsed by the XML. A CDATA section starts with <![CDATA[ and ends with ]]>.

Step 2 – Insert the HTML into the Magento Product View template

The next step is to place the HTML in your Magento product page wherever you want it to appear. Find your product page template, if it doesn’t exist create it with a copy of the file from the base/default/template folder.

app/design/frontend/default/[your_template]/template/catalog/product/view.phtml

Insert the following code:

{code type=html}

{/code}

The attributes within the div tag can be changed to affect the functionality of the button, inserting data-send=”false” will enable the Send button alongside the Like button, data-show-faces=”true” will enable Facebook profile picture thumbnails of those who have already liked the page and so on. Full documentation for the Facebook Like button is available here.

The post Add the Facebook Like button to Magento Product Pages appeared first on Zero-1.

Enter the ‘Smooth Move 301 Redirect Handler’ extension

Produced by the expert Magento developers ZERO-1 this extension has been developed and used by us with our existing clients for over 12 months and because of its success and ease of management we have decided to launch it commercially to the Magento Community. Smooth Move 301 Redirect Handler is available for both Magento Community and Enterprise.

The post Worried about moving to Magento? appeared first on Zero-1.