This is especially the case within Travel and Tourism sectors as more and more people look to make up there own holiday packages by booking flights independently to accommodation. This means if you are an accommodation provider you need an engaging website, with detailed text and pictures. The visitor needs to totally understand what they will get, if they think something is missing they won’t ring or email you but just go back to the search engine results and try the next one on the list.  You also need to be ready for when they make a decision as you need them to book and pay a deposit whilst you have them interested. A lot of people that leave the site to fill in a form and post a cheque will have second thoughts and re-consider.

This all means travel and tourism operators need to:

• Have an informing and visually stimulating website. Photo and Videos help travel websites more so than other markets.
• Manage online reputations and be open by integrating them into your website. A piece of negative feedback does not have to be bad if handled appropriately.
• Make use of third party distributor sites such as Coast Radar, Last Minute, as they have bigger marketing budgets and rank well under highly competitive keywords.
• Give information on the surrounding area to give the visitor ideas on what they can do when they visit.

A lot of small travel and tourism websites don’t put the amount of effort they should into marketing. All too often a website is created and left to market itself, which of course it can’t do. This means those websites are missing out on all those people ready to buy.

Remember your website is operational 24 hours a day and will receive more visitors than you received phone calls, make sure it reflects your business, provides all the answers to visitors questions and allows them to book.

You really have three categories of visitors.

• Contact – visitors coming to your website to get contact details or directions. These could well be existing customers looking to get in touch.
• Action – visitors that know what they want and are intent on purchasing. These could be people knowing they want to stay in your location and are looking for a specific property at a specific price.
• Information – visitors looking for information or researching. These could be people that have been told an area is nice to visit but are looking for ideas.

Once you understand the above three types of visitors to your website then you can plan your pages accordingly. Pages should not be combined but meet the specific needs of one of these types.

Once you know what pages you need then you can think about how the visitors will find these pages on the search engines. Here you need to look at your page and research the search engine keywords that visitors will enter and where you want to be in the returned search engine results.

When you have your site live then you need to constantly monitor using your analytics to understand where visitors come from, the search terms used and where they navigate to on your website. Based on this monitoring you need to fine tune, fine tune and fine tune.

It is not all about money but about targeting the available budget at the best areas to get a return on investment. We have worked with a number of smaller companies and managed to get quality traffic that make purchases. It is not about the number of unique visitors but about the number of visitors that actually purchase. I would prefer to have 10 visitors a day that purchase then 1000′s that don’t.

Some points to consider.

Don’t compete with generic keyword terms. Most small websites will not get to page one on Google for generic popular terms as budgets don’t allow the necessary spend to achieve this.

Instead select very focused or niche keyword terms. Look at the areas of your business you are a specialist in. Focus your keyword terms and search engine optimisation on these very focused terms, often called exploiting the long tail. For example, Praeparo are an internet marketing agency in the UK that specialize on helping local businesses. It is not worth us trying to compete for “UK internet marketing agency” as even if we did achieve this we don’t really want to take work from a business 500 miles away. Instead we need to focus on less competitive local terms “Berkhamsted internet marketing agency” and “Aylesbury internet marketing agency”.

Once you have identified your target keywords then focus your marketing budget based on your sales. Your marketing budget needs to be set to the return it achieves in increasing sales. All too often small businesses tell us we don’t have any spare money to use for marketing. You need to switch your thinking to how much of each sale can I dedicate to marketing. For example,

• first find what your average sale is, lets say average sale was £500 and after costs profit was £200.
• If our analytics say we have 1000 visitors a month and 1% of all website visitors purchase then this would tell us every 1000 visitors would create (10*200) £2,000 profit.
• If we were to allocate £20 of each sale to get new customers this would give us £200 per month.
• Don’t worry this reduces the profit from £2000 to £1800 as this marketing budget would only have to bring in one more sale a month to break even
• With a budget of £200 a month, every month you should be looking to double your visitors and thus your profit.

Thus, your marketing/SEO budget can bring you more profit, it does not have to be a cost!

Hopefully this has got you thinking so just give us a call on 020 8123 8159 and we can discuss over the phone or arrange to drop in and have a chat.

I know it is only October but people are starting to plan and get ready for Christmas.

You need to be putting the final elements to your Christmas internet marketing plan now in order to make the most of the high volume Xmas purchasing.

In a lot of cases this is:
- a small content change to focus on Christmas,
- a blog entry or article seeding present ideas,
- a new focused adwords campaign,
- or to just increase SEO work already being done.

Why not give us a call 020 8123 8159 to see if we can help. No obligation to purchase anything just a chat to bounce around some ideas.

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which you get paid for helping others earn profits. This is done by marketing their product or service and receiving commission for each sale that happens through your efforts.

You will see lots of reports of people earning millions and millions of dollars each year. Although, you have a few that do earn this type of money, it is hard work. Remember you don’t get money for nothing!

Affiliate marketing can be approached in many ways, but is in effect internet marketing for somebody else’s product. As you are promoting another’s product you have the same internet marketing challenges but without the expense of product development.

Affiliate Marketing basically falls into a number of techniques and a clever affiliate marketeer will combine:

* Review Site Marketing: Here you build a website that offers a review of the product. Review pages can be placed on your own website, social media or one of the many free blogging sites.

* Article Marketing: Here you write short articles related to your affiliate product. The articles need to be to article sites, directories, blog sites and social-bookmarking sites. Every article site has the bio of the submitter and this is where you promote the affiliate link. The bio can have the affiliate link or point at your own website.

* E-mail Marketing: You need an email list before this will even get off the blocks. If you do have a list then an excellent way to upsell. The success rate will be directly related to the product you are promoting and the reason you captured the email address. Note, please obey all spam laws.

*PPC( Pay Per Click) Marketing: This is a very profitable marketing model but requires an upfront investment as you will have to try a few times before you are successful. You must make sure and monitor carefully your cost per click against the percentage of people that purchase. It is easy to get carried away and spend more than you make.

Where now?

If you want to read up some more why not have a look at The Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing on the Web: How to Use and Profit from Affiliate Marketing Programs

So first of all our internet marketing plan should be to get to page one and then we can tune to start moving up page one.

Any website strategy should include the steps:

STRATEGY | PLAN | BUILD | TRAFFIC

STRATEGY

You can’t achieve anything without knowing what your end goal is. Too often we have new customers that don’t like current search engine ranking but when asked don’t have a clea idea of what any end goal or objective is. Some of the items to consider are:

1. Brand. What is your current position and where do you want to be.
2. Products and Services. List all your product and services and decide on a unique selling proposition for each.
3. Marketing. Document current marketing achievements and rank based on success.
4. Budgets. What budget do you have per month to focus on your marketing.

Document the above in a business plan and marketing plan.

PLAN

Once you have a strategy documented in your marketing plan then you can start to plan how to execute this in terms of marketing campaigns. One word of warning is that your business is different to others and should have a unique plan with measurements that link back to your strategy and objectives. Whatever you do MUST be measured and anything not returning a good return on investment should be reviewed, tweaked or abandoned.

Any page one result is going to be based on a single keyword phrase; this is the phrase the search engine visitor types and your result appears. Some phrases will be more difficult than others based on the number of searched per month and the number of websites in competition with you for the phrase. Thus, the planing stage has keyword identification and prioritisation as the key element.

The plan is going to be based on your budget. Any internet marketing campaign is going to be long term and needs to focus on specific keywords. You will not be able to hit all keywords from day one and so prioritise the keyword phrases and create a plan per phrase.

At this stage you will need to decide if you want to concentrate purely on organic or natural search engine results or/and include a pay per click element to your campaign.

BUILD

You know have a strategy and plan. The plan first stage should be to build or adjust the website based on your selected keyword phrases. It is NOT worth spending a penny until you have a single page optimised for a single keyword phrase. In a lot of cases where the phrase is not very competitive this may well suffice to get you onto page one.

This stage also needs to add measurement capabilities to your website, for example website analytics, to enable you to measure progress and success.

TRAFFIC

Getting to page one is really about getting traffic to your website. For each keyword phrase you would have identified a single landing page which has now been optimised. The point now is to work on off-site factors to help increase that pages position in the search engine results and thus drive traffic to your website.

What you also need to measure is what the traffic does when getting to your website as you need them to achieve a goal. This could be to buy a product or service or subscribe to a newsletter. Whatever the goal we must track it so that we have a value per goal based on the spend to get the visitor. This enable us to decide if the campaign is working and returning a good return on investment. It is not worth spending £20 per visitor, where only 10% makes a purchase of a product costing £10 as this only breaks even.

NEXT STEPS

Have a browse around the Praeparo website to find out more about each stage.

If you’d like to know more, call us today on 020 8123 8159.

Any internet marketing campaign needs to be a partnership between the website designer, website developer, seo expert and business owner. This partnership must have clear boundaries and responsibilities and most important of all needs to be managed by the business owner.

The first step is to recruit and SEO expert this can be by taking on a full time employee, freelance SEO consultant or working with an SEO company or agency like Praeparo. When selecting one of the above options you have to remember that SEO is becoming specialised and whomever is used must keep up to date with all new movements in the SEO field.

Now we have SEO handled clear communication must be put in place as optimisation if done at website design and development stages saves a lot of money down the line. All planned changes need to be sent out for impact and the changes only actioned once all impacts have been received back. This means you get a full view design – development – marketing and business.

To help with communication an SEO strategy and plan should be created that provides clear guidance as to what is to be achieved in the search engine optimisation or marketing campaign. This to include a prioritisation of the existing website and a plan to change or optimise each page. Some top priority pages will need to be modified as soon as possible but others can wait. If this plan is in place then any website change request can also then make a change based on the optimisation plan. This means we optimise the lower priority pages through the standard website maintenance cycles.

Reports should be created and communicated at least monthly so everyone knows how the optimisation campaign is going.

Remember the more successful you are the more you competitors will copy and try to beat you. All search engine marking campaigns need to be continually running to make sure you get to the top and stay on the top.

Praeparo SEO experts can either take on your whole strategy or work on aspects of your optimisation. We are experienced and happy to work at all levels and experts in helping the small to medium business that does not have the time in-house to run and execute a campaign efficiently.

One tool that can help is from Social Mention (see socialmention.com). This will give you a scorecard of your current position across a big selection of social media sites and tools. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

You can submit a query on the web page and also ask for daily reports to be emailed.

In Praeparo’s terms this is a must have in your marketing toolset and part of your brand monitoring efforts within your internet marketing strategy.

When I am asked to explain why business planning is so important, my first inclination is to quote Lewis Carroll. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice comes to a fork in the road and asks:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

For me this scene encapsulates perfectly the problems of not having an over-arching goal and plan for your business. Without a plan, a business is essentially rudderless, and day-to-day activities are likely to be haphazard and reactive, in stark contrast to those businesses implementing a well thought out business plan.

The following represents a list of my top five reasons a firm needs a business plan.

1. To Map the Future

A business plan is not just required to secure funding at the start-up phase, but is a vital aid to help you manage your business more effectively. By committing your thoughts to paper, you can understand your business better and also chart specific courses of action that need to be taken to improve your business. A plan can detail alternative future scenarios and set specific objectives and goals along with the resources required to achieve these goals.

By understanding your business and the market a little better and planning how best to operate within this environment, you will be well placed to ensure your long-term success.

2. To Support Growth and Secure Funding

Most businesses face investment decisions during the course of their lifetime. Often, these opportunities cannot be funded by free cash flows alone, and the business must seek external funding. However, despite the fact that the market for funding is highly competitive, all prospective lenders will require access to the company’s recent Income Statements/Profit and Loss Statements, along with an up-to-date business plan. In essence the former helps investors understand the past, whereas the business plan helps give them a window on the future.

When seeking investment in your business, it is important to clearly describe the opportunity, as investors will want to know:

• Why they would be better off investing in your business, rather than leaving money in a bank account or investing in another business?
• What the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) for the business arising from the opportunity is?
• Why people will part with their cash to buy from your business?

A well-written business plan can help you convey these points to prospective investors, helping them feel confident in you and in the thoroughness with which you have considered future scenarios. The most crucial component for them will be clear evidence of the company’s future ability to generate sufficient cash flows to meet debt obligations, while enabling the business to operate effectively.

3. To Develop and Communicate a Course of Action

A business plan helps a company assess future opportunities and commit to a particular course of action. By committing the plan to paper, all other options are effectively marginalized and the company is aligned to focus on key activities. The plan can assign milestones to specific individuals and ultimately help management to monitor progress. Once written, a plan can be disseminated quickly and will also prompt further questions and feedback by the readers helping to ensure a more collaborative plan is produced.

4. To Help Manage Cash flow

Careful management of cash flow is a fundamental requirement for all businesses. The reason is quite simple–many businesses fail, not because they are unprofitable, but because they ultimately become insolvent (i.e., are unable to pay their debts as they fall due). While the break-even point–where total revenue equals total costs–is a highly important figure for start-ups, once a business is up and running profitably, it becomes less important.

Cash flow management then becomes more vital when businesses pursue investment opportunities where there are significant cash out flows, in advance of the cash flows coming in. These opportunities need to be assessed against any seasonal variations in the business and the timing of the flows. If you are a “cash-only” business, you can bank the income immediately; however, if you sell on credit, you receive the cash in the future and hence may need to pay some of your own expenses before that income hits your account. This will put a further strain on the company’s solvency and hence a well structured business plan will help you manage funding requirements in advance.

5. To Support a Strategic Exit

Finally, at some point, the owners of the firm will decide it is time to exit. Considering the likely exit strategy in advance can help inform and direct present day decisions. The aim is to liquidate the investment, so the owner/current investors have the option of cashing out when they want.

Common exit strategies include;

• Initial Public Offering of stock (IPO’s)
• Acquisition by competitors
• Mergers
• Family succession
• Management buy-outs

Investment decisions can be taken in the present with one eye on the future via a well-thought-out business plan. For example, if the most attractive exit route appeared to be selling to a competitor, present day management and investment decisions could focus on activities that would increase the company’s attractiveness to that competitor.

Given that valuing firms is notoriously difficult and subjective, a well-written plan will clearly highlight the opportunity for the incoming investors, the value of it and increase the likelihood of a successful exit by the current owner.

Article content provided by: bplans.co.uk and paloalto.co.uk

The key aspect in any marketing strategy is to fully understand where you stand with respect to your competitors. For this, we use a SWOT analysis to identify your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. A SWOT analysis allows you to look at your environment from within and from outside.

Your strengths and weaknesses are often internal to your business environment. For example, a strength could be your pricing policy and service offerings, but a weakness could be the limitations of your research budget.

Strengths: Your strengths provide your competitive advantage over your competitors. Strengths may include: good customer service, a strong brand and/or reputation.

Weaknesses: Weaknesses pinpoint areas of concern and can include high overheads or a new untested brand.

Opportunities and threats look at the outside factors.

Opportunities: New opportunities may enable you to explore new directions. For example, a change in government policy or new technologies.

Threats: These can include factors such as a new competitor or any change in legislation that may adversely affect you.

A good way to get to the bottom of this is to workshop your employees and to talk to suppliers or friendly customers.

Once produced this is input into the marketing strategy and needs to be undertaken at regular periods. This is not a one-off task.